Wireless charging for weighted energy balance in populations of mobile peers

TL;DR

This paper explores wireless energy transfer among battery-limited mobile devices in a peer-to-peer setting, aiming to prolong network lifetime through distributed energy balancing protocols.

Contribution

It introduces the first study of peer-to-peer wireless energy transfer among weak, distributed devices without special chargers, addressing diverse energy levels and priorities.

Findings

Three protocols achieve different trade-offs in energy balance quality and efficiency.

Protocols are analyzed and evaluated under both lossless and lossy transfer conditions.

The study demonstrates effective distributed energy balancing in weak, mobile device populations.

Abstract

Wireless energy transfer is an emerging technology that is used in networks of battery-powered devices in order to deliver energy and keep the network functional. Existing state-of-the-art studies have mainly focused on applying this technology on networks of relatively strong computational and communicational capabilities (wireless sensor networks, ad-hoc networks); also they assume energy transfer from special chargers to regular network nodes. Different from these works, we study how to efficiently transfer energy wirelessly in populations of battery-limited devices, towards prolonging their lifetime. In contrast to the state-of-the-art, we assume a much weaker population of distributed devices which are exchanging energy in a "peer to peer" manner with each other, without any special charger nodes. We address a quite general case of diverse energy levels and priorities in the network and study the problem of how the system can efficiently reach a weighted energy balance state distributively, under both loss-less and lossy power transfer assumptions. Three protocols are designed, analyzed and evaluated, achieving different performance trade-offs between energy balance quality, convergence time and energy efficiency.