Multi-hop energy sharing in rechargeable wireless sensor networks

Energy-sharing is an emerging technique to address energy limitation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper argues a novel manner, multi-hop energy sharing, to realise self-organised multi-hop energy delivering. We propose an multi-hop energy sharing scheme (MESS) to implement multi-hop energy sharing by finding feasible node pairs instead of paths. MESS considers two cases: static and dynamic. Two algorithms are correspondingly designed: static energy sharing algorithm (SESA) and dynamic energy sharing algorithm (DESA). The theoretical performance of both algorithms are 1 1/e of the optimal algorithm while their energy consumption is bounded. The performance of DESA has an additional error E(Delta tau) on average, where Delta tau is performance difference between DESA and the optimal one at each time slot tau. We also conduct detailed simulation to evaluate our scheme. The simulation results show that MESS can greatly improve fairness of energy consumption among whole network with a little energy consumption.