Abstract
In this work, the concept of peer-to-peer energy sharing in wildlife communication systems is explored. In this context, wild animals can share energy wirelessly besides their data communications as they opportunistically come into range of each other. Our goal is to find a way to balance the energy among the nodes and minimize this energy loss. We propose a novel encounter-based energy-sharing scheme, called EBES, that utilizes single and multi-hop transmission to achieve energy balance, minimize energy losses, and maximize the lifetime of the wildlife communication system. EBES is based on a variety of parameters, including the amount of energy left in the system and the nodes' encounter rate, and buffer sizes. In the simulation studies, we considered a wildlife communication network that is involved in data communication and applied EBES over the opportunistic routing protocols such as EBR, Spray&Wait, and Epidemic resulting in a network lifetime increase of 35% and improving the routing protocols performance. Additionally, we compared EBES with the other well-known energy balancing techniques that also contribute to data communication such as EA-Epidemic, EERPFAnt, and OE-OLSR and the results show the remaining energy was improved by 31%, 26%, and 15%, respectively.