Successive Interference Cancellation Based Throughput Optimization for Multi-Hop Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks †

Wireless Sensor Networks are constrained by low channel utilization and limited battery capacity, so they are widely regarded as the mainly performance bottlenecks. In this paper, in order to improve channel utilization and prolong network lifetime, we investigate the cooperation of multi-hop Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs) with Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) technology. In WRSNs, since the flow rate of each node is unknown, the power of the nodes is not constant. However, SIC will not work if the signal power levels at receive node cannot be sorted. To solve this issue, we first construct a minimum energy routing and unify the transmit rate to determine the transmit power. We can also obtain the time scheduling scheme after determining the routing and power. Next, we formulate an optimization problem, with the objective of maximizing the mobile charger’s vacation time over the rechargeable cycle. Finally, we provide a near-optimal solution and prove its feasible performance. Simulation results present that SIC can achieve the better upper boundary on throughput (compared to inference avoidance increasing about 180–450%) and no extra transmit and receive energy consumption in the multi-hop WRSNs.