Energy balancing in mobile opportunistic networks with wireless charging: Single and multi-hop approaches

Abstract

Leveraging peer-to-peer energy sharing solutions between nodes, energy balancing aims to balance energy among the nodes in a network towards prolonging the network lifetime especially when external energy supply is not available. Previous studies target an energy balance among the devices as fast as possible but they waste energy in the network during this process due to the excessive interactions between nodes. Moreover, they do not take into account different contact relations between the nodes in the network. In this paper, we address these issues and present efficient and loss-aware energy balancing protocols considering the contact graph heterogeneity between nodes and a time threshold for completing the energy balancing. We consider both the single hop and multi-hop based energy exchanges among nodes and design separate protocols for each. Through simulations, we show that the proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art solution by reaching a better energy balance with a lower energy loss, and multi-hop based approach performs better than single hop based one. We also discuss the implications of energy balancing process on network lifetime through different use cases and provide the necessary modifications on the proposed system to maximize the network lifetime especially in disconnected networks.