Toward a Perpetual IoT System: Wireless Power Management Policy With Threshold Structure

With the advancement of wireless energy harvesting and transfer techniques, an Internet of Things (IoT) node equipped with a wireless charging facility can request and receive energy from wireless chargers deployed at different locations. This provides more opportunity for the mobile IoT node to replenish its battery and be able to operate without interruption due to shortage of energy supply. In this paper, we develop an optimal energy charging scheme for the mobile IoT node, considering the states of location, traffic generation, and energy storage. We formulate the problem of energy charging as a Markov decision process (MDP) to obtain the mobile IoT node’s optimal policy. The objective is to maximize the expected utility. Furthermore, we prove that the optimal policy of the proposed MDP has a threshold structure. The numerical results show the performances of the mobile IoT node under various scenarios and parameter setting. Furthermore, the proposed MDP-based wireless energy charging scheme outperforms conventional baseline schemes.