Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 2679: Efficient Energy Supply Using Mobile Charger for Solar-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks (Sensors)

An energy-harvesting wireless sensor network mitigates the energy shortage problems of existing battery-based wireless sensors; however, its hotspot area sensor nodes still experience 3 blackouts, thereby reducing network connectivity. Techniques that transfer energy directly to sensor nodes using wireless power transfer (WPT) have been studied in recent years to address this issue. In this paper, we propose a technique that uses a drone (quadcopter), which is a type of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), as a mobile sink. The drone selects and manages anchor nodes that aggregate data temporarily, collects data by visiting the anchor nodes to mitigate the hotspot issue, and then prevents blackouts by supplying energy to low-energy nodes, thereby improving network connectivity. The anchor nodes are carefully selected after considering the energy capacity of the drone, the size of the network, the amount of collected data, and the energy consumed by the nodes to increase the network’s energy efficiency. Furthermore, energy is transferred from the drone to the anchor nodes to support their energy consumption. In our study, this method reduced the blackouts of sensor nodes, including anchor nodes, in hotspot regions, and increased network connectivity, thereby improving the amount of data gathered by the mobile sink.