Is Crowdcharging Possible?

Abstract

Limited battery capacity has been the main bottleneck for smartphones. Users are required to charge their smartphones frequently to keep them alive. Access to a charging facility, however, may not be possible especially when users are outside. This has caused users to charge their devices at every opportunity with as much power as possible. While this results in overcharging of devices unnecessarily, it might have brought an opportunity for the realization of power sharing among mobile devices. In this paper, we introduce the concept of crowdcharging which aims to provide mobile users with ubiquitous power access through crowdsourcing. We first discuss the feasibility of crowdcharging from users' perspective and present some analysis and survey results showing the interest and need. We then look at the software and hardware challenges to build such a system. To this end, we have developed a mobile app that builds a mobile social network environment among the users and manages the entire process of power sharing between the mobile devices. We present the software implementation details using P2P wireless energy sharing and provide initial lab results with actual wireless charging hardware.