Achieving Collision-Free Communication by Time of Charge in WRSN

Abstract

The Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) Sample et al. (IEEE T Instrum Meas 57(11):2608–2615, 2008) has become a very promising experimental platform of wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSN), which integrates the sensing and computation capabilities to the traditional RFID tags. In such kind of networks, the simultaneous transmission may introduce severe communication collisions, which have attracted various research efforts for resolving such collisions at the MAC layer. However, different from existing works, we avoid such communication collisions through proper reader movement by exploiting the differences in the time of charge among rechargeable sensor nodes. We formulate the optimization problem and prove that complexity of the optimal solution is NP-hard, and propose a simple yet effective algorithm to optimize both the reader stop location and stop time for minimizing the total communication delay. Extensive simulations under different system settings show that our design can largely reduce the communication delay and outperform the baseline design by at least 20 %.