Overlapped Mobile Charging for Sensor Networks

In this paper, we consider a fundamental problem: given one mobile charger that can charge multiple sensor nodes simultaneously, how we can schedule it to charge a given WSN to maximize the energy usage effectiveness (EUE)? We propose a novel charging paradigm–Overlapped Mobile Charging (OMC)– the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. Firstly, OMC clusters sensor nodes into multiple non-overlapped sets using k-means evaluated by the Davies-Bouldin Index, such that the sensor nodes in each set have similar recharging cycles. Secondly, for each set of sensor nodes, OMC further divides them into multiple overlapped groups, and charges each group at different locations for different time durations to make sure that each overlapped sensor node just receives its required energy from multiple charging locations.