Project Objective
The objective of this proposed research is to integrate a wireless electricity (witricity) charging technique into wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs monitor physical or environmental conditions with spatially distributed autonomous sensor devices. A sensor is a tiny computer with extremely limited computational capacity, memory size, data transmission capacity, and battery power. It is widely accepted that the batteries on the sensors are hard or very expensive to recharge. Due to the limited battery power in each sensor, energy efficiency has been one of the most critical factors in existing WSN protocols, and many aspects of network performance are sacrificed in those protocols. To eliminate the energy constraint from a WSN, we propose research on witricity charging protocols in wireless sensor networks. The proposed research will include a witricity charging protocol for multi-hop power transmission from the power source to the power capturing device as shown in Figure 1. A witricity charging protocol is much more than simple witricity passing between sensors. Rather, it is coordinated energy passing between a large number of sensors with minimal energy leakage and, if charging is limited, maximizing the network lifetime. The energy transmission efficiency indicates how much energy is leaked during the witricity transmission.
The significance of this project is that, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate witricity technology into a WSN while minimizing energy leakage and maximizing network lifetime. Upon successful completion of this research, researchers in the WSN field will be able to focus more on improving WSN performances than on considering the energy constraints in sensor devices.
Project Description
The Radford University CREU 2010-2011 team will be devoting 10-15 hours per week on research, journals, and other activities relating to the project. All progress will be recorded and posted on this website, along with any other important updates and information.
