Directional charging-based scheduling strategy for multiple mobile chargers in wireless rechargeable sensor networks

With the development of wireless charging technology, the network lifetime of wireless sensor networks has the potential to be significantly extended. Although recent works have explored the use of mobile chargers to charge sensor nodes omnidirectionally, research on directional charging of mobile chargers is lacking. Considering the high efficiency of directional charging, this paper studies mobile charger scheduling using directional charging to achieve node energy replenishment. Initially, charging anchor points and subsets with the highest utility in the network are chosen, enabling a one-to-many directional energy supply. Subsequently, the improved artificial bee colony algorithm is employed to schedule the path planning of multiple mobile chargers. During the charging process, real-time request nodes may be inserted in the planned route, provided that charging time and battery capacity requirements are met. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has advantages over other methods, significantly reducing the moving path length, total energy consumption, and the number of starved nodes.