Utilizing Multipath Effects for Mobile Charging

Recently, Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs) have emerged as a promising solution to address the energy limitations of wireless sensor networks. In practical applications of WRSNs, environmental objects are ubiquitous, reflecting radio waves and causing them to reach sensors via multiple paths. These multipath effects significantly impact the power intensity received by sensors. In this paper, we study a fundamental issue of charGing schEduling with mulTipath effectS (GETS), that is, how to schedule a mobile charger by comprehensively considering the multipath effects to maximize the overall charging utility. To this end, we first establish a charging model with environmental objects to investigate the impact of multipath effects on power distribution. Then, we propose a charging scheduling scheme that not only selects a series of sojourn locations for the MC (Mobile Charger) to maximize the total power received by nearby sensors but also construct a charging path that avoids environmental objects. We conduct extensive simulations as well as indoor and outdoor field experiments to evaluate the performance of our scheme. The results demonstrate that, on average, our scheme outperforms baseline algorithms by 48.87%