Towards Wireless Power Transfer in Mobile Social Networks

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is an enabling technology that energizes IoT devices as well as sensors at a distance without power plugs. In this paper, we consider WPT for mobile social networks (MSNs), where power is transferred from one to another via close proximity contacts among humans with a mobile device. In such a scenario, we introduce the problem of wireless charger allocation for MSNs, in which for the given number of wireless chargers, a subset of nodes are selected as power source nodes, and then, power is disseminated from the power sources to the other nodes via direct and/or indirect contacts. To this end, we first design the weighted connectivity metric for quantifying the importance of nodes and then propose the adaptive wireless charger allocation (AWCA) algorithm. Our AWCA consists of two phases. In the first phase, wireless chargers are allocated to a subset of nodes as power sources. In the second phase, power is efficiently transferred over an MSN. For performance evaluation, computer simulations using real human contact traces are conducted, and the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AWCA algorithm achieves its design goals as long as the transmission efficiency is sufficiently high.