Lifetime maximization for sensor networks with wireless energy transfer

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), to supply energy to the sensor nodes, wireless energy transfer (WET) is a promising technique. One of the most efficient procedures to transfer energy to the sensor nodes consists in using a sharp wireless energy beam from the base station to each node at a time. A natural fundamental question is what is the lifetime ensured by WET and how to maximize the network lifetime by scheduling the transmissions of the energy beams. In this paper, such a question is addressed by posing a new lifetime maximization problem for WET enabled WSNs. The binary nature of the energy transmission process introduces a binary constraint in the optimization problem, which makes challenging the investigation of the fundamental properties of WET and the computation of the optimal solution. The sufficient condition for which the WET makes WSNs immortal is established as function of the WET parameters. When such a condition is not met, a solution algorithm to the maximum lifetime problem is proposed. The numerical results show that the lifetime achieved by the proposed algorithm increases by about 50% compared to the case without WET, for a WSN with a small to medium size number of nodes. This suggests that it is desirable to schedule WET to prolong lifetime of WSNs having small or medium network sizes.