Charging Skip Optimization with Peer-to-Peer Wireless Energy Sharing in Mobile Networks

Increasing software capabilities and complicated applications running on smartphones have increased the quality of life for users. However, the battery lives of smartphones have stayed limited due to the respectively slower improvements in battery technology. Users are often required to find a charging port and connect the phone to the port through a cable. A lot of times, this process can be irritating or even infeasible. Through adoption of emerging wireless power transfer technology in these devices, charging process has transformed into a new dimension. Moreover, this has brought the opportunity for wireless energy exchange between mobile devices ubiquitously. In this paper, we investigate the potential of peer-to-peer energy sharing to reduce the burden of traditional cord- based charging process. The devices of users can make use of energy available from other users' devices based on their meeting patterns so that the battery level of their devices could be maintained within acceptable level without the need of charging it through a cable frequently. Our specific goal in this study is to find the maximum number of traditional way of charging times that could be skipped through utilization of available energy in other users in the vicinity with wireless energy sharing. To this end, we use dynamic programming approach to find the optimal skipping patterns for selfish and cooperative energy exchange cases and verify the results with brute force.