An Energy Recharging Scheme for Perpetual Lifetime and Maximal Monitoring Quality in WRSNs

Wireless sensor networks have been widely applied in a large number of applications. However, the sensors are battery powered. To solve the problem of limited network lifetime, many scholars have studied the recharging issue. Some sensor recharging algorithms only considered the energy consumption of the sensors, while the others only considered the recharging path of the mobile charger. None of them considered the monitoring quality when developing the recharging algorithms. This paper considers mobile wireless sensor networks where one mobile charger and a number of mobile sensors are deployed. The developed mechanism considers both the recharging efficiency and the monitoring quality. In addition, the cooperation between mobile charger and mobile sensors are explored to cope with the problem that the mobile charger needs to visit each sensor for recharging. The experimental results show that the performance of our algorithm outperforms the other compared algorithms, in terms of monitoring quality.