Yi Jun Min, Yoon Ikjune
Department of Smart Systems Software, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978, Korea.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Jun 13;19(12):2679. doi: 10.3390/s19122679.
An energy-harvesting wireless sensor network mitigates the energy shortage problems of existing battery-based wireless sensors; however, its hotspot area sensor nodes still experience 3 blackouts, thereby reducing network connectivity. Techniques that transfer energy directly to sensor nodes using wireless power transfer (WPT) have been studied in recent years to address this issue. In this paper, we propose a technique that uses a drone (quadcopter), which is a type of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), as a mobile sink. The drone selects and manages anchor nodes that aggregate data temporarily, collects data by visiting the anchor nodes to mitigate the hotspot issue, and then prevents blackouts by supplying energy to low-energy nodes, thereby improving network connectivity. The anchor nodes are carefully selected after considering the energy capacity of the drone, the size of the network, the amount of collected data, and the energy consumed by the nodes to increase the network's energy efficiency. Furthermore, energy is transferred from the drone to the anchor nodes to support their energy consumption. In our study, this method reduced the blackouts of sensor nodes, including anchor nodes, in hotspot regions, and increased network connectivity, thereby improving the amount of data gathered by the mobile sink.
能量收集无线传感器网络缓解了现有基于电池的无线传感器的能源短缺问题；然而，其热点区域的传感器节点仍会出现三次停电，从而降低了网络连接性。近年来，人们研究了利用无线电力传输（WPT）直接向传感器节点传输能量的技术来解决这一问题。在本文中，我们提出了一种技术，该技术使用无人机（四轴飞行器）作为移动汇聚节点，无人机属于无人驾驶飞行器（UAV）的一种。无人机选择并管理临时聚合数据的锚节点，通过访问锚节点来收集数据以缓解热点问题，然后通过向低能量节点供电来防止停电，从而提高网络连接性。在考虑无人机的能量容量、网络规模、收集到的数据量以及节点消耗的能量后，精心选择锚节点以提高网络的能源效率。此外，能量从无人机传输到锚节点以支持其能量消耗。在我们的研究中，这种方法减少了热点区域包括锚节点在内的传感器节点的停电次数，并增加了网络连接性，从而提高了移动汇聚节点收集到的数据量。
