Energy Beamforming and Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks for Cable Pipeline Monitoring

Wireless sensor network (WSN) serves as a main candidate technology for fulfilling the requirements of cable pipeline monitoring, which collects various data from sensors via multi-hop wireless transmission. However, the performance of WSN is seriously restrained by the lifespan of sensors' battery energy. To this end, this paper integrates multi-antenna energy beamforming into WSN, which enables the sink to radiate directional beams towards the sensors and remotely charge them. Under this setup, an energy efficiency maximization problem is formulated to jointly optimize energy beamforming, slot duration, data sensing, and power control. We then develop an efficient approach to solve this intractable problem, based on the techniques of alternative optimization and convex approximation. Experimental results showcase the performance improvement of energy beamforming over traditional energy broadcast scheme, and the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation is also validated.