Petri-Net Based Multi-Objective Optimization in Multi-UAV Aided Large-Scale Wireless Power and Information Transfer Networks

Abstract

Power consumption in wireless sensor networks is high, and the lifetime of a battery has become a bottleneck, restricting network performance. Wireless power transfer with a ground mobile charger is vulnerable to interference from the terrain and other factors, and hence it is difficult to deploy in practice. Accordingly, a novel paradigm is adopted where a multi-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) with batteries can transfer power and information to SDs (sensor devices) in a large-scale sensor network. However, there are discrete events, continuous process, time delay, and decisions in such a complicated system. From the perspective of a hybrid system, a hybrid colored cyber Petri net system is proposed here to depict and analyze this problem. Furthermore, the energy utilization rate and information collection time delay are conflict with each other; therefore, UAV-aided wireless power and information transfer is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. For this reason, the MAC-NSGA II (multiple ant colony-nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II) is proposed in this work. Firstly, the optimal trajectory of multiple UAVs was obtained, and on this basis, the above two objectives were optimized simultaneously. Large-scale simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to NSGA II and MOEA/D in terms of energy efficiency and information collection delay.