Toward an Efficient Anchor Point Determination for Mobile Charger in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

Recently, numerous recent studies have delved into the scheduling of mobile vehicles (i.e., mobile chargers (MC)) for the purpose of recharging sensor nodes using wireless energy transfer technologies. Unfortunately, many of these recent investigations failed to take into account significant aspects such as the energy consumption incurred by the vehicles during their movement and the constraints of their recharging capabilities. To reduce the energy consumption of the MC, researchers have proposed improvement of topological organization of the network. Thus, we have developed a grouping algorithm aimed at building the topology of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose an algorithm to organize the network in such a manner that creates a near-optional number of anchor points. Note that anchor points are sojourning locations of an MC to charge nearby sensor nodes. This approach uses modified affinity propagation clustering algorithm to determine the best possible set of anchor points. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing similar methods.