A Novel Data Collection Method with Recharge Plan for Rechargeable Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Because of recent advances in wireless power transfer technologies, several key topics of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) need to be revisited. Traditional data collection methods for WSNs typically consider the balance of power consumption among sensors as a critical design criterion for avoiding uneven power depletion in the networks. I propose a solution for the uneven power consumption problem of data collection over WSNs. I designed a node‐Gosper island‐based scalable hierarchical cluster transmission method in conjunction with a wireless recharge plan for data collection over rechargeable WSNs. For the recharge plan, I used mobile wireless chargers to visit and recharge the batteries of sensors located on different levels of node‐Gosper curves with various frequencies. The duration of each recharging process for each layer of sensors was calculated to verify the feasibility of the proposed recharge plan. The simulation results indicate that my proposed data collection method outperforms several well‐known data collection methods in terms of energy consumption and that my proposed recharge plan is more efficient than previous approaches in terms of charge path length, number of alive nodes, and traveling efficiency.