Mobility-assisted energy replenishment for sensor networks

Over the past decade, sensor networks have consistently been a focus of the computer research community, and a large number of prototypes have been built for military and civilian applications. One of the fundamental research issues of sensor networks is the energy scarcity problem. Due to the nature of sensor networks, e.g., small-size sensor nodes and large-scale deployment, sensor nodes cannot carry a large amount of energy or be conveniently recharged. As a result, the amount of energy that can be carried by a sensor node fundamentally limits the use of sensor networks. A large number of schemes have been proposed to address this issue. These schemes, however, have one or more the following drawbacks: (i) energy cannot be replenished to the network, and thus the network lifetime is bounded by the amount of energy preloaded to sensor nodes; (ii) the ways of replenishing energy to the network may not be practical and reliable, and thus may not support normal operations of the network; and (iii) sensor nodes drained of energy are left in the deployment field, and thus may cause pollution to the environment. Fundamentally addressing this problem requires energy to be continually replenished to sensor nodes. This can be achieved in two approaches (i) The Node Reclamation and Replacement Approach: Sensor nodes with low or no energy are reclaimed periodically, and are replaced with fully charged ones. (ii) The Wireless Recharging Approach: Sensor nodes are periodically recharged with energy transmitted from wireless chargers over radio. Both the approaches exploit mobility in accomplishing energy replenishment. Specifically, one or more mobile agents, which could be human technicians or robots, travel around the network, and perform sensor reclamation and replacement or wireless recharging task. In this dissertation, we propose an array of new mobility-assisted energy replenishment schemes. Firstly, for the node reclamation and replacement approach, we propose a node replacement and