An Optimal Replenishment Strategy in Energy Harvesting Wireless Networks with A Mobile Charger

Energy harvesting wireless network is an emerging paradigm where the wireless nodes harvest energy to increase their lifetime. Due to high potential for a large variety of applications, such networks have drawn considerable attention in both industry and academia. In this paper, we consider the energy replenishment problem when the wireless nodes not only harvest energy from the ambient environment but also may receive energy from a mobile charger. We propose an optimal energy replenishment strategy using stochastic inventory theory to derive the optimal amount of energy supplied by the mobile charger. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme not only optimizes the energy utilization, but also improves the economic benefit of the wireless nodes. Copyright © 2015–2015 ICSTThe work is supported in part by programs of NSFC under Grant nos. 61422201, 61370159 and U1201253, U1301255, Guangdong Province Natural Science Foundation under Grant no. S2011030002886, High Education Excellent Young Teacher Program of Guangdong Province under grant no. YQ2013057, and Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou under grant no. 2014J2200097 (Zhujiang New Star Program), 240079/F20 funded by the Research Council of Norway, the European Commission FP7 Project CROWN (grant no. PIRSES-GA-2013-627490), and Singapore A*Star SERC 142 02 00043.• Best paper award.CROW