Wireless Networks with Energy Harvesting and Power Transfer: Joint Power and Time Allocation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a joint power and time allocation scheme for wireless energy harvesting networks, significantly improving throughput by optimizing BS power broadcast and time sharing among nodes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel joint power and time allocation scheme for wireless powered networks, outperforming existing methods and addressing practical circuit power consumption scenarios.

Findings

The proposed scheme maximizes network throughput under power constraints.

It outperforms existing schemes that only optimize time allocation.

Generalized solutions for fixed circuit power consumption are provided.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider wireless powered communication networks which could operate perpetually, as the base station (BS) broadcasts energy to the multiple energy harvesting (EH) information transmitters. These employ "harvest then transmit" mechanism, as they spend all of their energy harvested during the previous BS energy broadcast to transmit the information towards the BS. Assuming time division multiple access (TDMA), we propose a novel transmission scheme for jointly optimal allocation of the BS broadcasting power and time sharing among the wireless nodes, which maximizes the overall network throughput, under the constraint of average transmit power and maximum transmit power at the BS. The proposed scheme significantly outperforms "state of the art" schemes that employ only the optimal time allocation. If a single EH transmitter is considered, we generalize the optimal solutions for the case of fixed circuit power consumption, which refers to a much more practical scenario.