Profit-driven UAV Green Wireless Charging for WSN

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been widely applied in Internet of Things (IoT). WSN brings great convenience to people's daily lives. In reality, the limited battery's capacity always constrains normal function time of a wireless sensor. Replacing the batteries one by one for the wireless sensors deployed in large-scale network or in dangerous places is quite infeasible. The recent research results reveal that unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a point-to-point far-field wireless charging unit can efficiently facilitate remote powering for WSN. The advantage of adopting charging UAV is that the distance between the wireless energy emitter and the receiver can be shortened; thus, enhancing the wireless charging efficiency. However, a UAV's energy supply usually does not allow the long-term charging mission, hence, the cost and profit of UAV wireless charging should be considered in UAV provisioned charging service. In this work, we first build a UAV wireless charging pricing model to calculate the profit of the charging service, and then, we propose the Profit-driven UAV Charging (PUC) algorithm to maximize the UAV charging profit. Through extensive simulations, we have validated that the performance of our proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional Nearest-Job-Next with Preemption (NJNP) algorithm.