Adaptive wireless power transfer in mobile Ad Hoc networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how mobility affects wireless power transfer in ad hoc networks, proposing adaptive charging strategies to extend network lifetime and analyzing their computational complexity and effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of dynamic adaptive charging range selection in mobile ad hoc networks and evaluates heuristic solutions for optimizing power transfer.

Findings

Fixed charging ranges are limited in effectiveness.

Adaptive heuristics improve network lifetime.

Complexity analysis shows offline optimization is NP-hard.

Abstract

We investigate the interesting impact of mobility on the problem of efficient wireless power transfer in ad hoc networks. We consider a set of mobile agents (consuming energy to perform certain sensing and communication tasks), and a single static charger (with finite energy) which can recharge the agents when they get in its range. In particular, we focus on the problem of efficiently computing the appropriate range of the charger with the goal of prolonging the network lifetime. We first demonstrate (under the realistic assumption of fixed energy supplies) the limitations of any fixed charging range and, therefore, the need for (and power of) a dynamic selection of the charging range, by adapting to the behavior of the mobile agents which is revealed in an online manner. We investigate the complexity of optimizing the selection of such an adaptive charging range, by showing that two simplified offline optimization problems (closely related to the online one) are NP-hard. To effectively address the involved performance trade-offs, we finally present a variety of adaptive heuristics, assuming different levels of agent information regarding their mobility and energy.