Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551

DOI 10.1007/s11036-014-0522-y

Effective On-Demand Mobile Charger Scheduling

for Maximizing Coverage in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor
Networks
Lintong Jiang · Xiaobing Wu · Guihai Chen · Yuling Li

Published online: 6 July 2014

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Using mobile chargers in wireless rechargeable 1 Introduction

sensor networks is an option for charging all the nodes in the
network. In order to achieve some performance requirement
The recent breakthrough in wireless energy transfer tech-
such as coverage, it is necessary to effectively schedule
nology [1] provides a promising alternative to power nodes
the mobile chargers to serve every node of the network.
of wireless sensor networks. Many existing works propose
We notice that nearly all previous works on mobile charger
to use mobile chargers in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor
scheduling assume that mobile chargers move along pre-
Networks (WRSNs) [2–5]. On one hand, using mobile
determined paths which are computed based on perfect
chargers is more economical compared to deploying mul-
priori information. In this paper, we consider the problem of
tiple static chargers since the charging range of a charger
scheduling mobile chargers in an on-demand way to maxi-
is limited. For example, the charging range of the device
mize the covering utility. On receiving re-charging requests
produced by PowerCast [6] is around 50 feet. On the other
from the nodes, the mobile charger decides how to move
hand, it is necessary to schedule the mobile chargers to meet
itself. The covering utility is defined to quantify the effec-
some kind of performance requirement. In nearly all the
tiveness of event monitoring. We formulate the scheduling
existing works, it is assumed that perfect priori information
problem as an optimization one. We propose three heuristics
is known and the trajectory of the mobile chargers can be
for this problem after proving its NP-Completeness. We
computed beforehand.
further generalize our solutions to accommodate the multi-
In this paper, we relax the availability of perfect priori
ple mobile chargers case. Finally we evaluate our solutions
information and consider an on-demand scenario in which
through extensive simulations.
mobile chargers move to charge sensor nodes when received
re-charging requests. Marios et al. [7] consider a similar
Keywords Wireless rechargeable sensor networks ·
scenario, but they require that the mobile chargers move
Mobile charger · Event monitoring · Scheduling · Covering
along a circular trajectory.
utility We consider the scenario where every mobile charger
(MC) travels around the sensor networks, and responds in
an on-demand way to the recharging requests initiated by
This work is supported by China 973 Projects (No. the sensors and recharges each sensor wirelessly to enable
2012CB316201, No. 2014CB340303), NSFC Grants (No. its continuous working for event monitoring. we concentrate
61321491, No. 61373130) and NSF of Jiangsu Province Grant
(No. BK20141319). on maximizing the covering utility along with prolonging
the network lifetime.
L. Jiang · X. Wu () · G. Chen The main contributions of this work are as follows. A
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology Nanjing
University Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China
preliminary version of this work has appeared in [8].
e-mail: wuxb@nju.edu.cn – As far as we know, this is the first work considering
Y. Li the on-demand mobile charger scheduling problem of
10 Huaken Road, Haikou, Hainan 570236, China WRSNs aiming to maximize the covering utility. We
544
consider both the single mobile charger and multiple
mobile chargers cases.
– We prove that the on-demand scheduling problem
is NP-Complete and propose three algorithms for
this problem by exploiting the spatial redundancy of
WRSNs.
– We evaluate our three proposed algorithms through
extensive simulations. Results indicate that our algo-
rithms perform much better in terms of the covering
utility compared to the existing works.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.
In Section 2, we briefly review the related works on the
mobility-assisted recharging and other on-demand appli-
cations. Section 3 gives the preliminaries and Section 4
presents a formal definition of the optimization problem of
MC-based on-demand scheduling to maximize the covering
utility. In Section 5, we analyze the problem hardness and
propose three heuristic algorithms. Section 6 presents eval-
uation results of our proposed algorithms. Finally Section 7
concludes this paper.
2 Related work
Jiang et al. [3] are the first to exploit wireless power charg-
ing by MCs for efficient stochastic event capture. Their
objective is to jointly determine the MC’s movement and
sensor activation schedules to maximize the Quality of
Monitoring (QoM). In [4], Shi et al. consider the scenario
of a mobile charging vehicle periodically traveling inside
the sensor network and charging each sensor node’s battery
wirelessly and introduce the concept of renewable energy
cycle and offer both necessary and sufficient conditions.
Zhao et al. [5] focus on the scenario that the MC visits
a selected subset of sensors in an predetermined path and
charges them and collects data from them simultaneously.
All the schemes above are based on the assumption of the
availability of perfect priori knowledge.
He et al. [12] consider the on-demand schedule of mobile
elements in a data collection application while we consider
a recharging scheduling in an event monitoring applica-
tion. In [11], He et al. further explore the more efficient
discipline for mobile scheduling. The disciplines proposed
are also taken as the reference in our simulation to validate
the efficiency of our algorithm.
Curiac et al. [18] are the first one to give a clarified def-
inition of spatial redundancy in wireless sensor network. In
[20], Cheng et al. propose two heuristic algorithms when
considering the spatial correlated data collection in wireless
sensor networks. Based on the assumption of spatial redun-
dancy, we explore the problem of maximizing the covering
utility in our work.
Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551
To the best of our knowledge, there are two online-like
mobile charging schedules targeting on prolonging the life-
time of wireless sensor networks. Marios et al. [7] propose
to let MC traverse the network according to a path that
is constrained to be circular. Wang et al. assume that a
mobile charger follows random walk on the grid of sen-
sors and the mobile charger conducts two battery-aware
energy replenishment strategies to recharge the sensors. In
this paper, we relax the constraint they set and focus on the
goal of maximizing the covering utility rather than purely
elongate the lifetime of network.
3 Models and assumptions
3.1 Network model and event monitoring model
Assume that m sensors V = {v1 , v2 , . . . , vm } are distributed
randomly in a two-dimensional area along with n PoIs O =
{o1 , o2 , . . . , on }. We assume that every sensor will cover
and monitor a circular area with the radius the same as its
sensing range r. For the event dynamics, we supposed that
the events at a PoI emergence one after another, and the
events’ happening at PoIs are independent both spatially and
temporally. Additionally, we think of the event staying time
to be short enough, that is, the events happening at different
time points will be regarded to be different. In a densely
deployed sensor network, the spatial coverage redundancy
is obvious. More specifically, spatial coverage redundancy
is incurred by the in-field geographic placement of the sen-
sor nodes and involves the replication of resources in the
network’s coverage area [18]. In a wireless sensors net-
work, it means that different sensors may cover some PoIs
in common. Let Oi represent the set of PoIs covered by sen-
sor vi . A summary of the notations in our paper is given in
Table 1.
Obviously, by effectively exploiting this spatial corre-
lation in the data collection process, unnecessary energy
costs for redundant data transmission can be largely
reduced. Thus, inspired by [20] we consider the deploy-
ment of sinks [21–23] in our scenario. Since the radio
transmission of sensors is the main source of energy con-
sumption and the energy cost of transmitting sensing data to
the sink is proportional to the distance the data has to travel,
then minimizing the energy consumption of radio trans-
mission is equivalent to minimizing the average distance
from sensor to the nearest sink. Further, we deploy sinks
within the working field based on the algorithm mentioned
in [21], which concentrates on the target of minimal average
distance. What’s more, according to [21], sensors with dis-
tance to the nearest sink less than their communication
range R will communicate with the nearest sink directly,
that is, one-hop transmission is adequate. We assume that
all of the sensors in our scenario work in such a one-hop
Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551 545

Table 1 Definitions of Notations Additionally, to prolong the lifetime of WSN, once the
residual energy of sensors go down below the threshold,
Symbol Meaning
sensors are scheduled to turn its regular working mode to
Va The set of active sensors low power mode in which sensors will stop monitoring
Vr The set of requesting sensors,or events and mainly focus on the forwarding of recharging
inactive sensors requests sent by others.
oi The i-th Point of Interst
vi The i-th Sensor 3.2 Rechargeable model
R The sensing range of sensors
τi The end time of the i-th service Most of the previous works engaged in MC recharging
(i)
tt The i-th traveling time based on the assumption that the MC works with the
(i)
tc The i-th recharging time perfect global knowledge [3, 4]. However, in practical sce-
(i)
ts The i-th service time narios, the working environments are always filled with
W Battery capacity of sensor intricacy, which make it varied and unpredictable. In this
Pi Working power of vi case, the periodical offline schedule tend to be of no appli-
PMC Working power of Mobile Charger cability without the sufficient priori information. To adapt
ηi Charging efficiency to the i-th sensor
to the scenario, on-demand working schedule is expected.
(i)
Pc The received power of the i-th sensor
That is, where there is a request for recharge, there is a
di The distance to the nearest sink for sensor vi
corresponding recharge to response. In addition, we assume
that the MC is equipped with ultra-capacitor [25]. Hence,
fi The rate of event generation within
we do not need to care about the MC’s energy supply.
the sensing range of sensor vi
When it comes to the on-demand mobile charging, it
ei Unit energy consumption,
means that the MC travels within the WSN, dynamically
i.e. the energy consumption per bit of sensor vi
receives and records the recharging requests sent from
b The size of sensory data of an event
sensors with insufficient energy supply, i.e. their residual
λ The average arrival rate of the recharging
energy supply goes down below the threshold αW , and
requests
dynamically make a decision about the next to-be-served
α Threshold factor
sensor based on the discipline it takes. Once the next to-be-
served sensor is chosen, the MC moves towards the target
sensor right away and recharges the sensor in a relative short
transmission mode, based on the fact that almost all of the distance which will maximize the charging efficiency.
sensors are within a distance of communication range R For a MC, it will maintain a requesting queue for the
with empirically proper number of sinks deployed. recharging requests, which is M/G/1 in Kendall’s Notation.
We assume that sensors work in an event-driven model All the recharging requests will be recorded and those sen-
[17]. That is, every sensor transmits a packet with relevant sors that send these requests will be kept in the requesting
sensing data to its nearest sink directly once capturing an queue by the MC. In fact, the requesting queue shares the
event. Besides, all packets are supposed to share the same same content with Vr . For arbitrary sensor i, we assume the
size in b bits. Moreover, a sensor will also send a recharg- received power is far larger than the working power. That is,
ing request through multi-hop transmission to the MC, once
its residual energy is lower than the energy threshold. For-
tunately, the packet size of recharging request is far less Pc(i) = ηi · PMC
than that of sensing data. Therefore, the energy consump- Pc(i) ≥ Pi (3)
tion caused by transmitting, forwarding and receiving the
recharging requests is ignorable. Thus, once the recharge begins, the sensor will immedi-
In terms of the energy threshold of sensors, it divides the ately return to regular working state from low power mode.
universal set of sensors into two parts, the set of active sen- Moreover, the recharging time mainly depends on the work-
sors Va , which consists of sensor whose residual energy go ing power of MC, the charging efficiency to specific sensor
over the threshold, and the set of requesting sensors, which and total battery capacity of sensor. In addition, the service
is mutual exclusive with the Va with respect to the universal time for a request is supposed to consist of the traveling time
set of sensors V , respectively. To formulate, and the charging time altogether.
W
tc(i) = (4)
Va + Vr = V (1) ηi PMC

Va Vr = ∅ (2) ts(i) = tt
(i)
+ tc(i) (5)
546 Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551

As for the i-th sensor, its working power depend on the 4 Problem statement
rate of event generating and the unit energy consumption.
Hence, the arrival rate of the request can be estimated as 4.1 Covering utility
follow,
In this part, we will first define the new metric, Covering
Utility. Before giving the exact formulation to the definition,
P i = f i · ei
we will introduce a series of conception contributing to this
m
Pi metric.
i=1
λ= (6)
(1 − α) · W Definition 1 Covering Utility denotes the global ratio from
After finishing the service for the last request, the MC the cardinal of Global Effective Coverage to that of Global
chooses the next target among the members in its request- Coverage.
ing queue with its predefined discipline and then leave for
the target. Especially, we assume that the time of making Conspicuously, in order to make a clarified definition
decision is neglectful since it is far smaller than the service of Covering utility, we show the conception of Global
time. Effective Coverage and Global Coverage in detail.
For an arbitrary sensor, its coverage set is Oi =
3.3 Energy consumption model {oi1 , oi2 , . . . , oi k }as our previous definition. We assume that
the PoIs might be covered by multiple sensors owing to
As we know, the radio transmission and the data processing the assumption of spatial redundancy. Therefore, in com-
subsystem have the great impact on the energy consump- puting the CU, we will eliminate the redundant information
tion of the sensor node [14]. However, it is explained in and only take the useful data into consideration as the pro-
[15] that it will be omitted as the power consumption of cessing scheme of the sinks. Above all, we use the UNION
the processor is almost constant related to RF output power operation to tackle this.
level and data rate. Therefore, we take the radio transmis- When it comes to Global Effective Coverage(GEC), it
sion power as the primary energy dissipation source of the denotes the set of PoIs that are covered by the active sensors.
sensor nodes. According to our network model, every sensor
always transmits its sensing data to the nearest sink, whose 
G = Ov (8)
energy dissipation is what we only need to consider and its
v∈Va
quantity mainly depends on the size of data in bit and the
ratio from the RF output power to the data rate of the com- Especially, the GEC is time sensitive and it is likely to
munication which is constant that rely on the radio module change with time going by. Hence, it is better to denote GEC
and the transmission range of the sensors [7]. Consequently, as G(t) rather G.
the unit energy consumption of the i-th sensor ei , i.e. that As for Global Coverage(GC), which is globally constant
for sending a bit data, is a function of transmission distance. and in the following form.
Therefore, we formulate the unit energy consumption model 
M = Ov (9)
of the i-th sensor as
v∈V
γ
ei = eelec + βdi + ε (7) Therefore, at arbitrary time point t, the CU can be
where the former part eelec +
γ
βdi is the expression of formulated as
transmission energy consumption and ε represent the unit |G(t)|
U (t) = (10)
energy consumption of sensing, logging, processing, and so |M|
on, which is distance independent and peripheral compared Each time MC finishes the service for a request, any
with that of transmission. Let eelec denote the unit energy sensors dwelling in the requesting queue of the MC can
γ
dissipated to transmit electronics. βdi is distance depen- be selected for the next target. Thus, for any sensor j in
dent. It indicates the radiated power necessary to transmit the requesting queue before making the i-th decision, the
one bit over a distance di , where β is constant [J /(bit ·mγ )] Incremental Effective Coverage(IEC) denotes the set of PoIs
and γ is the distance based path loss exponent. Accord- that are going to be effectively covered if the j sensor are
ing to the existing literature [9, 16], we set γ = 2 for free chosen.
space fading while γ = 4 for multi-path fading. Based on
the assumption above, sensors, in our scenario, communi-
(i)
 
cate with its nearest sink directly. Hence, we only need to Ij = Ov − Ov (11)

consider the free space fading, i.e. γ = 2. v∈Va {j } v∈Va
Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551 547

Additionally, the Trial Covering Utility(TCU) that repre- whether we can achieve it is NP-complete. We redefine it
sents the average Covering Utility during the service time of below and then prove its intractability.
sensor j is listed as follow,
 (j ) Definition 2 (Maximum Covering Utility Charging
1 ti−1 +ts
(i) Schedule)(MCUCS) Suppose that we are given a set S of
Uj = (j )
U (t)dt
ts ti−1 sensors with W energy reserve each and for each sensor
 ti−1 +ts
(j ) vi ∈ V a list L of pairs in which tji corresponds to the
1
= (j )
|G(t)|dt (12) time that the j-th event captured by vi and eji denotes the
ts · |M| ti−1 energy needed to transmit the sensing data. We are also
To maximize the Global CU, we adopt greedy strategy to given an |V | × |V | matrix D, where Dk,l is the Euclidean
choose the next to-be-served sensor by updating the Piece- distance between sensor k and sensor l and an MC which
wise Covering Utility(PCU) with maximal Trial Covering can recharge i-th sensor to its full energy supply with charg-
Utility each time the MC finishes the last service. ing time tc(i) . The MCUCS problem is to determine whether
there is a feasible schedule for MC to visit the sensors so
that no event is not captured due to insufficient energy.
(i)
U (i) = max{Uj } (13)
j
Theorem 1 MCUCS is NP-complete.
Although greedy strategy can never guarantee the global
optimal solution, it always can attain excellent approximate Inspired by [7], we can reduce the Geometric TSP
optimal solution empirically. problem to MCUCS and show that MCUCS is NP-
complete. We omit the proof here due to space limitation.
4.2 Problem formulation
5.2 Greedy heuristics
We formally formulate our problem as follows.
1  (i)
N
Since the MCUCS problem is NP-Complete, we resort to
Maximize N U
i=1 greedy algorithms. For convenience, the MC is assumed
s.t. (3)(10)(12)(13), to maintain a service queue X = {x1 , x2 , . . . , xN } which
where N denotes the number of requests we consider in records the order of service along the time sequence. In
our scenario. addition, once the next to-be-served sensor is chosen, the
Theoretically, we should make a decision about the next target will be inserted into service queue.
to-be-served sensor based on Eq. 13. In fact, however, it
is paradoxical that we always cannot figure out the accu-
5.2.1 Maximal next coverage utility first algorithm
rate PCU of service of any sensor before finishing its
service because of the dynamics of the on-demand mobile As indicated by its name, Maximal Next Coverage Utility
recharging. That is, during the service time, the upcoming First (MNCUF) requires the MC choose the current maxi-
recharging requests will come unexpectedly and we never mal IEC to serve. In other words, MC checks the requesting
know when they will arrive. Hence, we can only make some queue and chooses the sensor with maximum IEC currently
reasonable approximation for selecting the suitable target as the next to-be-served sensor . That is,
sensor with maximal PCU to pursue the goal of maximizing
(i)
Covering Utility. In the next section, we introduce three I (i) = max{Ij }, (14)
j
greedy heuristic algorithms.
which is a specific instance for the strategy of maximizing
PCU (13). The illustration of MNCUF is shown in Fig. 1.
5 Theoretical analysis and problem solving The pseudocodes of the MNCUF algorithm are given in
Algorithm 1. The first two lines are initialization. The
In the section, we show the NP-Completeness of the prob- service target (xi ) is decided at line 4. In lines 5 ∼ 8, if the
lem and then we propose three greedy algorithms to approx- MC has already served all the requests, then the starting time
imate the optimal solution of maximizing CU. of this service is updated to the arrival time of next requests.
The traveling time and charging time of this service are cal-
5.1 Problem hardness culated at line 9. The PCU of this service is computed at line
10. The starting time of next service and the set of active
According to the definition of Eq. 10, the CU is bounded by sensors are updated at lines 11 ∼ 12. At lines 13 ∼ 16 the
one, which is the ideal destination of the schedule. However, next service target is chosen based on the rule of MNCUF
548 Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551

5.2.2 Maximal average coverage utility first strategy

Different from MNCUF, this algorithm takes the trade-off

between the travel time and IEC of every service into con-
sideration and greedily selects the maximal average TCU,
called Maximal Average Coverage Utility First (MACUF).
We substitute the equation of TCU (12) with the following
formulation.
(j ) (j )
(i)
|G(ti−1 )| · tt + |G(ti−1 ) + Ij(i)|tc
Uj = (j )
(15)
(i)
ts · |M|
Fig. 1 Illustration of MNCUF where Uj estimates the maximal PCU make a decision
for the next target. The illustration of MACUF is shown in
Fig. 2. The MACUF algorithm is shown in Algorithm 2.

(MACUF); The target is put into the back of service queue X

at line 17. We set the red triangles to the requesting sensors
Algorithm 2 MACUF algorithm
Input:
Distance matrix D;
Algorithm 1 MNCUF algorithm
Cover set C = {O1 , O2 , . . . , Om };
Input: Requests queue R = {r1 , r2 , . . . , rN };
Distance matrix D; Speed of MC v;
Cover set C = {O1 , O2 , . . . , Om }; Output:
Requests queue R = {r1 , r2 , . . . , rN }; the set of accurate PCU {U (1) , U (2) , . . . , U (N ) };
Speed of MC v; //Algorithm MACUF is the same to MNCUF except that
Output: they have different rule when selecting the next target.
the set of accurate PCU {U (1) , U (2) , . . . , U (N ) }; //Replacing the lines 13 ∼ 17 of Algorithm MNCUF with
1: x0 ←Id denoting Base Station; the following 7 lines comes the Algorithm MACUF.
2: t0 ←0; 1: for ∀k ∈ Q  
3: for i = 1 to N 2: Ik =
(i)
Ov − Ov ;

4: xi ← X.pop f ront (); v∈Va {k} v∈Va
5: if xi == ∅ 3: (i) D(xi ,k)
tk = v ;
6: rnext ← R.pop f ront (); (i)
(k) (i) (k)
|G(ti )|·tt +|G(ti )+Ik |tc
4: Uk = ;
7: ti−1 ← trnext ; (k)
t ·|M|
s
8: end if 5: end for
(i)
(x )
9: tt i ←
D(xi−1 ,xi ) (xi )
; tc = ηx W ; 6: xi+1 ← arg maxk∈Vr Uk ;
v i PMC
 (xi ) 7: X.push back(xi+1);
ti−1 +ts
10: U (i) ← (xi )1 ti−1 |G(t)|dt;
ts ·|M|
11: ti ← ti−1 + ts(xi ) ;
12: Va ← Va + {xi };
13: for ∀k ∈ Vr  
(i)
14: Ik ← 
Ov − Ov ;
v∈Va {k} v∈Va
15: end for
16: xi+1 ← arg maxk∈Vr |Ik(i)|;
17: X.push back(xi+1);
18: end for

and black box for MC. And the dash lines denote possible
service in the next and the only solid line for the chosen
target. Fig. 2 Illustration of MACUF
Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551 549

5.2.3 MACUF strategy with multi-MCs Empirically [9, 20], the energy consumed by the elec-
tronics per bit eelec = 50 nJ /bit and the unit energy of free
space loss β = 100 pJ /bit/m2 . Under the circumstance
As we all know, the more frequently the requests arrive, the
lower the Coverage Utility. Multiple MCs can be exploited that the transmission power predominates in the energy dis-
to lower the average arrival rate of requests for each MC. sipation, we set the sum of any other source of energy
consumption ε = 30nJ /bit, computed with the parameter
Suppose that there are n MCs in total, and they are num-
setting provided by [9]. We assume that the message size
bered sequentially, {0, 1, 2, . . . , n − 1}. Intuitively, although
every MC receives and records the information of all the is 2Kbits, i.e., b = 2000. A total number of 100 requests
requests within the WRSNs, the i-th MC only inserts the are served during each simulation, which is repeated for 100
times with different topology. Additionally, we assume that
(kn + i)-th requests, where k ∈ N , into its requesting queue
events happen independently in time and in any of the PoIs.
and then responses them with MACUF discipline. Addi-
Once an event occurs, sensors that cover it can detect it, then
tionally, we assume that once every MC finishes its every
service, it will broadcast the packet with the information generate the packet of sensory data in the size of 2Kbits and
about this service among all the MCs, which makes it pos- transmit it to its nearest sink. A total number of 100 requests
are served during each simulation, which is repeated for 100
sible that every MC can accurate trace the variation of GEC
times with different topology. To comprehensively exhibit
and global PCU in the scenario with Multiple MCs. The
detail of this strategy is ignored due to space limitation. the stability and excellence of the algorithm proposed, we
take different distributions of the sensors into considera-
tion, such as Uniform, Poisson and Gaussian, with the PoIs
6 Performance evaluation uniform deployed.

6.1 Evaluation setup 6.2 Performance comparison with existing works

We perform trace-driven simulations to evaluate our pro- In this section, we compare our algorithms to the schemes,
posed algorithms. In order for the traces, we utilized NJN [11] and FCFS [12]. Note that the algorithms above
the energy harvesting development kit P2110-EVAL-01 are devised for the scenario of data collection. To make
produced by Powercast [6]. After examining the traces, the comparison feasible, we transform the two disciplines
we find that the range of received power of sensor is to our concerned scenarios at first. That is, a MC follows
[15mW,45mW], which can be interpreted into a charging either NJN or FCFS serves the requesting sensor one after
efficiency ηi between [0.5%, 1.5%]. Also, the battery another and the charging time for every service cannot be
capacity of sensor is randomly selected from a range ignored, which is contradicted with its primitive assump-
[100J,1000J]. Without loss of generality, we set the battery tion. In our scenario, the NJN discipline which performs
capacity to 100J and the received power of every sensor more excellently than the FCFS discipline in its original
Pc = 20mW . In our scenario, the sensing field is a 100×100 data collection situation may have a poorer performance
m2 square with 100 randomly distribute sensors, 300 PoIs than the latter one. That is, based on the assumption of
and 10 sinks. Furthermore, we set the sensing range r = spatial redundancy, the NJN that always choose a near-
15m and the threshold factor α = 20%. est target to serve will have least probability to ensure its

1 1 1

0.95 0.95
0.9
0.9 0.9

0.8 0.85
0.85
Covering Utility

Covering Utility

Covering Utility

0.8
0.8
0.7 0.75
0.75
0.7
0.6 0.7
0.65

0.6 0.65
0.5 MNCUF MNCUF MNCUF
MACUF MACUF MACUF
NJN 0.55 0.6
NJN NJN
FCFS FCFS FCFS
0.4 0.5 0.55
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2
Average Arrival Rate(s) −4 Average Arrival Rate(s) −4 Average Arrival Rate(s) −4
x 10 x 10 x 10

Fig. 3 Covering Utility vs. Average Arrival Rate

550 Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551

1 1 1
MNCUF
MACUF
0.95 0.95 NJN
MNCUF
0.9 MNCUF FCFS
MACUF
MACUF 0.9 0.9
NJN
NJN
FCFS
0.8 FCFS 0.85
0.85
Covering Utility

Covering Utility
Covering Utility
0.8
0.8
0.7 0.75
0.75
0.7
0.6 0.7
0.65

0.6 0.65
0.5
0.55 0.6

0.4 0.5 0.55

0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25
The Speed of MC(m/s) The Speed of MC(m/s) The Speed of MC(m/s)

Fig. 4 Covering Utility vs. Speed of MCs

global covering utility, causing an even worse behavior than sense on average performance and the space limit, we will
FCFS. not discuss the extreme case any further. In the randomly
deployed network, such bottleneck hardly happen within
1) Evaluation of different rates of event generation: we
the extensive repeated simulation and the performance of
vary the rate of event generation and compare the Cov-
MNCUF always approximately equate with that of MACUF
ering Utility of all of MACUF, MNCUF, NJN and FCFS
no matter what distribution the sensor deployment subjects
along with the change of the arrival rate of requests.
to, which is shown in Fig. 3a-4c.
In Fig. 3, the speed of MC v is set to 0.01m/s, which
makes the traveling time essential. As can be seen, both
6.3 Performance evaluation among multi-MCs case
of our algorithm, MACUF and MNCUF, always outper-
form both of NJN and FCFS in terms of distribution.
As the algorithm stated in the Section IV-D, the more MCs
And the preponderance increases with the increment of
we use, the less average arrival rate the equivalent situation
arrival rate, i.e. the queue system tends to be more busy.
is. In this part, we are carrying out extensive simulations to
2) Evaluation of different speeds of MC: we continue to
testify the statement. We deploy different numbers of MCs
focus on the Covering Utility of all the algorithms influ-
(n=1, 2, . . . , 8) that is/are serving in the sensing field in dif-
enced by varied speed v. In this evaluation, all the
ferent simulations and compare the Covering Utility with
simulation are based on a comparably heavy rate of
the varying average arrival rate together. Additionally, the
event generation,which measured by the average arrival
speed of every MC is set to v = 0.01m/s. Figure 5 shows
rate,λ = 1×10−4 . Intuitively, with the speed increasing,
that the larger number of MCs we choose, the higher over-
the traveling overhead goes down, so as the response
all CU we obtain. We may well try to deploy MCs as many
delay to the charging requests, which may lead to higher
as we can to achieve the higher CU. However, taking the
Covering Utility. We plot all the varied Covering Utility
fact that the power charger is expensive into consideration,
along with the changing speed of MC in the Fig. 4.
the trade-off between the overall CU and the cost makes
Due to the situation that the bottleneck in the Algorithm 1 the problem more challenging. Intuitively, on account of the
breaking out is a minor probability event, which make no heaviest condition in the working field, which means the

1 1 1

0.95 0.95
0.95
0.9 0.9
0.9
Covering Utility

Covering Utility

Covering Utility

0.85 0.85

0.8 0.8 0.85

0.75 0.75
0.8
0.7 λ=0.5×10
−4 0.7 λ=0.5×10
−4
λ=0.5×10
−4

−4 −4 −4
λ=1×10 λ=1×10 0.75 λ=1×10
0.65 λ=1.5×10
−4
0.65 λ=1.5×10
−4
λ=1.5×10
−4

−4 −4 −4
λ=2×10 λ=2×10 λ=2×10
0.7
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
The Number of MC The Number of MC The Number of MC

Fig. 5 Covering Utility vs. Number of MCs

Mobile Netw Appl (2014) 19:543–551
largest average arrival rate, i.e. λ = 2×10−4 , only two MCs
will be adequate to achieve a satisfying Covering Utility.
As for that of Uniform and Poisson distribution, one more
or two MCs are demanded to guarantee a fairly high CU,
which exceed 90%.
6.4 Performance evaluation among different distribution
As shown in Figs. 3, 4, 5 the algorithms we proposed work
have the best performance, compared to NJN and FCFS. We
also notice that the proposed algorithms work the best with
the Gaussian distribution, followed by the Poisson and Uni-
form. Consequently, the more asymmetrical the deployment
distribution is, the better performance our disciplines will
have.
7 Conclusion
In this paper, we consider the mobile charger scheduling
problem to maximize the covering utility of event moni-
toring in WRSNs. Since the problem is NP-Complete, we
propose three heuristic algorithms to improve the perfor-
mance. We evaluate the proposed algorithms through exten-
sive simulation and the results show that our algorithms
work effectively and outperform the existing works. In the
future, we will further propose some more efficient and
performance-guaranteed algorithm for charger scheduling.
We also plan to come up with distributed solutions for
this problem. Additionally, considering the scenario where
mobile sinks with charging ability are deployed is also inter-
esting and challenging. We might investigate this problem
in the future.
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