Starvation Avoidance Mobile Energy Replenishment for Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

The breakthrough progress of wireless charging technology provides a significant opportunity to solve the energy constrained problem in wireless sensor networks. However, most of existing mobile energy replenishment schemes either cannot well adapt to the high diversity of energy consumption or leave out of consideration about the fairness of charging response, and thus may still suffer from non-negligible performance degradation resulted from energy starvation. Particularly when there is a large number of charging requirements, the energy starvation may bring about quite a number of sensor nodes invalid due to energy depletion. In this paper, we explore the energy starvation issue while provisioning energy for wireless sensor networks and propose a Starvation Avoidance Mobile Energy Replenishment scheme (SAMER) which can avoid energy starvation through calculating and considering the maximum tolerable latency of each charging requirement. The simulation results show that SAMER scheme can effectively solve the energy starvation problem and achieve efficient mobile energy supplement for wireless sensor networks.