W3W: Energy management of hybrid energy supplied sensors for internet of things

The usage of hybrid energy supplied sensors in the Internet of Things has enabled longer lifetime of sensors and expanded scope of applications. These sensors can combine advantages of environmental energy harvesting techniques and wireless energy harvesting techniques. However, how to coordinate them is still a challenge and has not been studied extensively. In this article, we present a system based on mobile crowd wireless charging to manage energy of hybrid energy supplied sensors. When environmental energy is insufficient, the system will utilize smart devices carried by mobile users as chargers to provide wireless energy. We construct and study a W3W problem in the system: when to leverage mobile crowd wireless charging to support rechargeable sensors, where to perform wireless energy transfer, and whom to allocate and incentivize as chargers to maximize useful energy value over all sensors subject to a budget. In order to control the actual quality of wireless energy charging, we propose a design principle named task completion trustfulness. We consider offline and online conditions and design corresponding algorithms with incentive allocations. Extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms, which also validates our theoretical results.