A Novel Joint Data Gathering and Wireless Charging Scheme for Sustainable Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is a crucial issue for a practical wireless sensor network (WSN) due to the battery-powered sensors. For improving energy efficiency, many methods have been designed in WSNs thanks to the emerging techniques, i.e., data gathering and wireless charging. The data gathering algorithms are advantageous to decrease the energy consumption of nodes, and the wireless charging schemes can replenish energy to sensors for achieving the semi-permanent WSN. Though lots of approaches of each technique have been designed, the joint methods of both are still lacking. In this paper, a joint data gathering and wireless charging scheme is designed by adopting the mobile chargers (MCs) which can execute the energy charging and the data collection simultaneously. To decrease the data latency, an improved clustering algorithm is implemented first to construct the topology of the WSN. Then, a heuristic-based MC scheduling scheme is proposed for maximizing the charging utility while minimizing the energy consumption of MCs. Compared with the existing joint method, the proposed scheduling scheme achieves the outperformance on delay and charging utility.