Cooperative Scheduling for Directional Wireless Charging With Spatial Occupation

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) technology has been developed rapidly in recent years. The cooperative charging model and corresponding scheduling methods have been proposed to save the charging cost in paid charging service. However, the state-of-the-art methods ignore the spatial occupation issue of rechargeable devices. Moreover, the cooperative charging scheduling in directional wireless charging has not been studied yet. This paper studies the cooperative scheduling for directional wireless charging with spatial occupation. We formulate the Cooperative Charging Scheduling with Spatial occupation (CCSS) problem of Mobile Rechargeable Sensor Devices (MRSDs) for optimizing the total cost of whole charging system. We first investigate the properties of optimal arrangement of MRSDs in charging group and calculate the tight intervals of charging angles of MRSDs. We show that it is sufficient to bound the error by conducting angle discretization for only two MRSDs in each charging group. Then, a(ln n+1)(1+ε)-approximation algorithm of the CCSS problem is proposed based on greedy approach, wherenis the number of MRSDs, andεis the discretization error. The results of extensive simulations and field experiments demonstrate that our algorithm can reduce at most 42.5% total cost comparing with the benchmark algorithms.