A Non-Cooperative Pricing Strategy for UAV-Enabled Charging of Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks are essential for monitoring, control, and surveillance operations, but the limited battery capacity of wireless rechargeable sensor nodes (WRSNs) poses a significant challenge. To address this, on-demand charging from an external power source is fundamental for the effective operation of energy-critical WRSNs. In this article, the wireless charging of the independent WRSNs in a network is modeled as a service in a common competitive market, where multiple charging service providers (CSPs) indulge in a pricing war to maximize their profits by achieving fair market share based on area division. A competitive market scenario is considered where multiple non-cooperative CSPs are strategically located at their fixed grounded stations, and the most economical CSP gets requested from a WRSN for charging. The CSPs are associated with UAV-enabled chargers (UAVEC), which are dispatched to the concerned WRSNs with known positions and recharged wirelessly in a time-bound manner. This paper study a suitable pricing strategy for on-demand charging of the WRSNs in a competitive market scenario; and investigate the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) for prices and profits of CSPs using a game-theoretic approach. The closed-form expressions of NE conditions and the CSP selection criterion for WRSNs are obtained, and the results are verified through simulations.