ChaseCharge: Charging Sensors by Chasing in Sensor-Cloud Systems

The recent breakthrough in wireless power transfer technology enables power to be delivered between transceivers, which is quite helpful for sensor-cloud systems. Traditional charging schemes are only suitable for static sensors, while the issue of charging mobile sensors is ignored. In this paper, we make the first attempt to serve mobile sensors in the sensor-cloud systems in a “chasing” way, where a mobile charger can chase mobile sensors to replenish them. We formalize the charging utility MAximization Problem for dynamic sensors with a mobile charger (MAP) and propose a ChaseCharge algorithm based on RNN to solve it. Theoretical analyses are presented to explore the features of the proposed scheme. We carry out simulations, and the results show that the performance of our algorithm outperforms comparison algorithms by 33% in utility on average. Test-bed experiments are conducted to validate the applicability of the proposed scheme in oceanic monitoring applications.