Improving Lifetime of Cell-Edge Smart Sensing Devices by Incentive Architecture Based on Dynamic Charging

In smart cities, a large number of smart sensing devices face the problem of limited portable battery capacity, which limits the working lifetime of smart sensing devices. However, wireless energy harvesting is an effective means to prolong their lifetime as soon as they are rechargeable. Most existing methods (e.g., mobile charging vehicles and dedicated power-beacons) are vulnerable to the smart sensing devices in complex terrain and difficult to care for all the charged objects. Moreover, they have high hardware maintaining cost. Therefore, we present a novel incentive architecture based on the dynamic charging to improve the lifetime of the cell-edge smart sensing devices. It leverages smart terminals carried by users as chargers to first provide wireless energy to a set of cell-edge smart sensing devices and then collect data from these sensing devices. Also, the smart terminals collecting data will act as forwarders, which will help the sensing devices transmit data to the data center through the base stations. The challenge is how to incentivize a smart terminal to act as both a charger and a forwarder. We propose the non-cooperative game for a set of smart terminals to address this issue, which can make these smart terminals get a satisfactory return and let the corresponding smart sensing devices improve their working lifetime. We conduct extensive simulations and demonstrate the effectiveness of our incentive architecture with the numerical results.