‘Power-as-a-Service’ – A Hierarchical On-Demand Charging Model for Recharging the Mobile Nodes of MANETs

Abstract

Battery energy is a crucial issue that limits battery-powered mobile devices’ operational efficiency in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Failure of a node affects both the lifetime and connectivity of a MANET, which has to initiate finding a new route from source to destination. This initiation causes more energy consumption in nodes. Failure of a node also causes network partitions, thereby resulting in sparse networks being formed. Existing energy-efficient strategies only defer the end of a node’s battery lifetime; they could not guarantee the MANET’s nonstop functioning. To address the issues caused by battery depletion, this paper proposes a “Cloud” oriented approach called Power-as-a-Service (PaaS), a hierarchical on-demand charging model for recharging the mobile nodes of the MANET. In PaaS, the MANET is alienated into non-overlapping disjoint zones, and for each zone, one Zone Charging Cloud Node (ZccN) is deployed to recharge the mobile nodes of that particular zone wirelessly. A High-power Charging Cloud Node (HccN) is deployed to wirelessly recharge the ZccNs in the MANET for the entire network. In PaaS, the ZccN recharges both the selected node for recharge and other nodes around the selected node that requested recharge and has higher power transfer efficiency. This strategy of PaaS improves the charging efficiency of cloud chargers by minimizing the urgent charging requests in the future, and thus the operational efficiency of the MANET improves. Extensive simulations indicate that the proposed PaaS model with a hierarchy of cloud chargers improves the operational efficiency of MANETs in terms of reducing the death rate of mobile nodes, thereby improving the lifetime and connectivity probability of MANETs.