Coverage and Connectivity Aware Energy Charging Mechanism Using Mobile Charger for WRSNs

Wireless recharging using a mobile charger has been widely discussed in recent years. Most of them considered that all sensors were equally important and aimed to maximize the number of recharged sensors. The purpose of energy recharging is to extend the lifetime of sensors whose major work is to maximize the surveillance quality. In a randomly deployed wireless rechargeable sensor network, the surveillance quality highly depends on the contributions of coverage and network connectivity of each sensor. Instead of considering maximizing the number of recharged sensors, this article further takes into consideration the contributions of coverage and network connectivity of each sensor when making the decision of recharging schedule, aiming to maximize the surveillance quality and improve the number of data collected from sensors to the sink node. This article proposes an energy recharging mechanism, called an energy recharging mechanism for maximizing the surveillance quality of a given WRSNs (ERSQ), which partitions the monitoring region into several equal-sized grids and considers the important factors, including coverage contribution, network connectivity contribution, the remaining energy as well as the path length cost of each grid, aiming to maximize surveillance quality for a given wireless sensor network. Performance studies reveal that the proposed ERSQ outperforms existing recharging mechanisms in terms of the coverage, the number of working sensors as well as the effectiveness index of working sensors.