A Vehicle-Aided Data Collection Scheme for Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

Extensive use of wireless rechargeable sensor network (WRSN) in various real-life detection and monitoring applications requires collection of environmental data periodically from the sensors. Some researchers try to solve the problem through multi-hop communication, where sensors that are located close to the base station (BS) will collect and forward data to the base station. However, these sensors run out of energy quickly, and data collection severely affected. Some researchers use mobile vehicles for data collection from all the sensors. Due to limited battery capacity of these vehicles, they may run out of their energy in the middle of the tour resulting into an ineffective data collection schedule. In this paper, we have formulated an optimization problem in WRSN for data collection with multiple vehicles, whose objective is to collect data from as many sensors as possible while minimizing the average travel distance of all the vehicles. We prove the problem to be NP-complete, design an effective data collection scheme while evaluating the performance of the proposed algorithm with respect to the existing schemes.