In a rechargeable wireless sensor network, the data packets are generated by
sensor nodes at a specific data rate, and transmitted to a base station.
Moreover, the base station transfers power to the nodes by using Wireless Power
Transfer (WPT) to extend their battery life. However, inadequately scheduling
WPT and data collection causes some of the nodes to drain their battery and
have their data buffer overflow, while the other nodes waste their harvested
energy, which is more than they need to transmit their packets. In this paper,
we investigate a novel optimal scheduling strategy, called EHMDP, aiming to
minimize data packet loss from a network of sensor nodes in terms of the nodes'
energy consumption and data queue state information. The scheduling problem is
first formulated by a centralized MDP model, assuming that the complete states
of each node are well known by the base station. This presents the upper bound
of the data that can be collected in a rechargeable wireless sensor network.
Next, we relax the assumption of the availability of full state information so
that the data transmission and WPT can be semi-decentralized. The simulation
results show that, in terms of network throughput and packet loss rate, the
proposed algorithm significantly improves the network performance.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular
Technolog
