Wireless power transfer technology opens up possibilities for charging the batteries of sensors wirelessly by wireless charging vehicles (WCVs), which increases the lifetime of Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs). Most of the existing studies do not consider the energy depletion of WCVs’ batteries during their travel through the network area, which may cause WCVs stranded in between their charging tours. In this paper, we have proposed a vehicle-assisted framework for charging sensors in WRSN, and formulated a bi-objective charge scheduling problem, where WCVs start their travel from a base station, charge the sensors, and finally return back to the base station with an aim to maximize the number of alive sensors while minimizing the total energy consumed for WCVs’ movement. The problem is proved to be NP-complete. Offline and online algorithms are proposed to solve the problem. An upper bound on the percentage of sensors that can be charged is also derived. Detailed simulations with sufficient number of WCVs have been carried out to investigate the performance of our proposed algorithms while comparing with the existing schemes, which reveals that our proposed algorithms excel in charging a large number of sensors compared to the existing algorithms.

无线功率传输技术为通过无线充电车（WCV）对传感器电池进行无线充电提供了可能性，从而延长了无线可充电传感器网络（WRSN）的使用寿命。现有的大多数研究都没有考虑WCV电池通过网络区域时的能量消耗，这可能导致WCV滞留在充电行程之间。在本文中，我们提出了一种用于WRSN中充电传感器的车辆辅助框架，并提出了一个双目标充电调度问题，其中WCV从基站开始行驶，对传感器充电，最后返回基站目的是使活着的传感器数量最大化，同时使WCV移动所消耗的总能量最小。问题被证明是NP完全的。提出了离线和在线算法来解决该问题。还得出了可以充电的传感器百分比的上限。在与现有方案进行比较的同时，已经进行了足够数量的WCV的详细仿真，以研究我们提出的算法的性能，这表明与现有算法相比，我们提出的算法擅长为大量传感器充电。