Network under limited mobile devices: A new technique for mobile charging scheduling with multiple sinks

Recently, many studies have investigated scheduling mobile devices to recharge and collect data from sensors in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) such that the network lifetime is prolonged. In reality, because mobile devices are more powerful and expensive than sensors, the cost of the mobile devices often consumes a high portion of the budget. Due to a limited budget, the number of mobile devices is often limited. Some sensors in WRSNs may not be operated without time limits due to the limited number of mobile devices. Therefore, sensors in a sensing field must be weighted by their importance, that is, the more important an area covered by a sensor, the higher the weight of the sensor. Therefore, in this paper, the problem of scheduling limited mobile devices for energy replenishment and data collection in WRSNs with multiple sinks such that the total weight of the recharged sensors that can be operated without time limits is maximized, termed the periodic energy replenishment and data collection with limited mobile devices (PERDCLMD) problem, is studied. In addition, the greedy scheduling algorithm (GSA) is proposed for the PERDCLMD problem accordingly. Simulation results show that the GSA provides a good performance in terms of the total weight of the recharged sensors.