A Framework of Mobile Energy Replenishment for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSAN) have such superiorities of real-time sense, response, and action on the environment, but WSAN's two kinds of key member sensor and actuator both suffer the serious energy constrained problem similar to that of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Currently, the breakthrough of wireless charging technology provides a new significant opportunity to solve the energy limited problem for WSN, and many fruitful works are emerging. However, the wireless energy supplement problem of WSAN has not been addressed yet. In this paper, we explore the wireless charging issue in WSAN, and propose a mobile energy replenishment framework which can well adapt to actuators' characters such as automatous mobility, long charging duration, and high dynamic energy consumption resulted by responding the abrupt events. Through extensive simulation, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, and the results show that our solution can achieve efficient mobile energy replenishment for WSAN.