Optimal Energy Management Policy of Mobile Energy Gateway
Abstract: With the advancement of wireless energy harvesting and transfer technologies, e.g., radio frequency (RF) energy, mobile nodes are fully untethered as energy supply is more ubiquitous. The mobile nodes can receive energy from wireless chargers, which can be static or mobile. In this paper, we introduce the use of a mobile energy gateway that can receive energy from a fixed charging facility, as well as move and transfer energy to other users. The mobile energy gateway aims to maximize the utility by optimally taking energy charging/transferring actions. We formulate the optimal energy charging/transferring problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). The MDP model is then solved to obtain the optimal energy management policy for the mobile energy gateway. Furthermore, the optimal energy management policy obtained from the MDP model is proven to have a threshold structure. We conduct an extensive performance evaluation of the MDP-based energy management scheme. The proposed MDP-based scheme outperforms several conventional baseline schemes in terms of expected overall utility.