Simultaneous Charger Placement and Power Scheduling for On-Demand Provisioning of RF Wireless Charging Service

To provision on-demand radio frequency (RF) charging service in a designated place, the problem of simultaneous charger placement and power scheduling is studied. Based on users' historic spatial and temporal distribution information, we formulate the problem as how to place a given number of chargers and how to adjust the chargers' power levels in each time interval so that the revenue of the charging service can be maximized, given the total power limitation constraint. The formulated problem is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem and we propose a branch and bound (B&B) algorithm to solve it. Extensive simulations in both small-scale and large-scale networks, as well as simulations based on the real data set are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The results show that, our proposed algorithm outperforms greedy algorithm, an algorithm that deals charger placement and power scheduling separately, in most of the simulation scenarios, and reaches the optimum in small-scale instances.