An efficient charging scheme using battery constrained mobile charger in wireless rechargeable sensor networks

Most of the existing works on periodic charging consider that the mobile charger (MC) has enough energy to charge the sensors by travelling across the charging path. The existing works also assumed that the sensors always get full charge from MC and hence negligible dead period occurs for sensors in wireless sensor network (WSN). However, the above mentioned assumptions are not always practical. In this paper, we propose a novel periodic partial charging scheme using battery limited MC, which charges the sensors such that the total dead periods of the sensors is minimized. We use genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the entire charging process. The simulation is performed to demonstrate the usefulness and competitiveness of the proposed scheme. We also verify the statistical significance of the simulation results using analysis of variance and post hoc least significant difference. The comparative analysis reveals that the proposed work improves the charging performance by reducing the dead period as well as number of dead sensors and maintain the perpetual network operation of WSN compared to the other existing works.