An intelligent charging scheme maximizing the utility for rechargeable network in smart city

Abstract The mobile charging scheme is a promising solution to extending the lifetime of the network by replenishing the energy for the sensing nodes, which has attracted more and more attention from the researchers. However, due to the limitation of energy storage both for sensing nodes and mobile chargers, not all the sensing nodes can be recharged in time by mobile chargers. Therefore, how to select appropriate sensing nodes and design the path for the mobile charger are the key to improve the system utility. This paper proposes an Intelligent Charging scheme Maximizing the Quality Utility (ICMQU) to design the charging path for the mobile charger. Comparing to the previous studies, we consider not only the utility of the data collected from the environment, but also the impact of sensing nodes with different quality. Quality Utility is proposed to optimize the charging path design. Besides, ICMQU designs the charging scheme for a single mobile charger and multiple mobile chargers simultaneously. For the charging scheme with multiple mobile chargers, the workload balance among different mobile chargers is also considered as well as the utility of the system. Extensive simulation results are provided, which demonstrates the proposed ICMQU scheme can significantly improve the utility of the system.