Developing a user-friendly sensor network simulator to imitate wireless charging vehicle behaviors

Abstract

An emerging breakthrough in wireless charging technology is expected to solve the power constraint problem in wireless sensor networks (WSN). In various works, wireless chargers are being bundled with mobile vehicles to recharge sensor nodes. In these works, simulations of mobile vehicles are typically used in experiments because building a wireless sensor network test bed is very costly and many details of a wireless sensor network are neither standardized nor finalized. Accordingly, a simulator is extremely useful in testing new applications or protocols in wireless sensor networks. However, several well-known wireless sensor network simulators have no or limited support for wireless recharging. Researchers may want to construct their own simulating modules, but the highly complex design of current simulators is intimidating and stops researchers from testing their applications. This work develops a framework for simulating a WSN and focuses on the simulation of wireless power transfer and mobile vehicles. This simulator eliminates the need for researchers to build their own simulator or integrate complex wireless charging modules, allowing them simply to implement their algorithm. Moreover, the proposed simulator has been verified by implementing the work of Xie et al. [20].