Localization in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks Using Mobile Directional Charger

Existing work on localization in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) assumes that the charger is equipped with an omnidirectional antenna. We notice that the current available COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) energy harvesting kit such as the one manufactured by Powercast includes wireless charger with directional antenna. We consider the localization problem in a wireless rechargeable sensor network with a mobile wireless charger. We propose two efficient region dividing methods, Angle Division and Grid Division. Both exploit the field angle of the directional charger to localize individual sensor nodes. The Angle Division is more suitable for general convex polygons. Grid Division algorithm is efficient when the nodes are distributed uniformly and the area is approximate to a rectangle. Further, we extend the two methods by combining the charging time to improve the localization precision. To verify the design, we have extensively evaluated our design by both field experiments and large-scale simulations. The experiment and simulation results show that our algorithm can achieve a localization distance error of less than a quarter meter by as less as four stops.