RECO: On-Demand Recharging and Data Collection for Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

The emerging Wireless Energy Transfer (WET) is a promising technology that has the potential to thwart the energy limitation challenge in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). WET-enabled WSNs are known as Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs). Over the last decade, various solutions have been suggested to minimize energy consumption and data delivery latency in WSNs. Among them, employing a mobile data collector has proven to be the most efficient solution. Motivated by this fact, we propose an on-demand recharging and data collection scheme called RECO, which employs dual-functioning mobile chargers (MCs) for both operations. RECO includes three essential procedures. 1) It clusters the network into multiple regions and defines two nonoverlapping itineraries on each partition; 2) It designs an efficient scheduling algorithm based on an Adapted Graham-Scan Algorithm (A-GSA); and 3) It defines anchor points to integrate the recharging and data dissemination processes. RECO is ideal for data delivery delay non-tolerant applications that were ignored by prior periodic recharging and data collection schemes. The experimental results demonstrate that RECO outperforms benchmarks regarding recharging and data collection efficiency.