A Mobile Charger based on Wireless Power Transfer Technologies: A Survey of Concepts, Techniques, Challenges, and Applications on Rechargeable Wireless Sensor Networks

The battery power limitation of sensor nodes (SNs) is a major challenge for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which affects the network survival. Thus, optimizing the energy consumption of SNs as well as increasing the lifetime of SNs, and thus, extending the lifetime of WSNs are of crucial importance in these types of networks. The mobile chargers (MCs) and the wireless power transfer (WPT) technologies have played an important long role in WSNs, and many researcher works have been done on how to use MCs enhance the performance of WSNs in the recent decades. In this paper, we first review the application of MCs and the WPT technologies in WSNs. Then, forwarding the issues, MC is considered in the role of power transmitter in WSNs and the existing approaches are categorized, with the purposes and limitations of the MC dispatching studied. Then an overview of the existing articles is presented, and in order to better understand the contents, tables and figures are offered that summarize the existing methods. We examine them in different dimensions such as advantages and disadvantages. Finally, the future prospects of MCs are discussed.