Mobile Energy Sharing through Power Buddies

Fueled by users' demand, mobile devices are becoming more complex, increasing their power requirements. However, the battery technology is advancing slower than demand which results in shrinking battery lives (i.e., currently around a day). Hence, users need to charge their devices frequently, mostly by tethering them to a cord. Anxiety of losing power in the middle of a critical task during which users may not have access to charging facilities have increased interest in opportunistic charging with the aim of keeping the devices with as much power as possible. Recently power sharing technologies and gadgets have emerged enabling harvesting power from other mobile devices in the user's vicinity. In this paper, we discuss the energy sharing in mobile social networks whose nodes are human-carried mobile devices operating on batteries. We investigate the limits of power sharing among mobile devices by analyzing their current charging patterns and the social (i.e., close-proximity) interactions between the people carrying these devices. Moreover, we propose an energy sharing model by pairing the nodes in a mobile network into power buddies. Simulation results show that a typical application scenario of energy sharing among power buddies provides a remarkable amount of saving in the utilization of power available in the entire network.