Deadline-Driven Multi-node Mobile Charging

Due to the merit without requiring charging cable, wireless power transfer technologies have drawn rising attention as a new method to replenish energy to Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs). In this paper, we study mobile charger scheduling problem for multi-node recharging with deadline-series. Our target is to maximize the overall effective charging utility, and minimize the traveling time as well. Instead of charging only once over a scheduling cycle, we incorporate the multiple charging strategy for multi-node charging with deadline constraint, where charging spots and tour are jointly optimized. Specifically, we formulate the effective charging utility maximization problem as to maximize a monotone submodular function subject to a partition matroid constraint, and propose a simple but effective 1/2 -approximation greedy algorithm. After that, we present the grid-based skip-substitute operation further to save the traveling time, which can increase the charging utility. Finally, we conduct the evaluation for the performance of our scheduling scheme. Comparing to the Early Deadline First scheme, the simulation and field experiment results show that our algorithm outperform EDF by 37.5% and 37.9%, respectively.