User Cooperation for Enhanced Throughput Fairness in Wireless Powered Communication Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a user cooperation scheme in wireless powered communication networks that improves throughput fairness by enabling users to exchange information and transmit jointly, effectively mitigating unfairness caused by energy harvesting disparities.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cooperation method with optimized time allocation to enhance throughput fairness in WPCNs, a significant advancement over existing schemes.

Findings

The cooperation scheme significantly improves throughput fairness.

Optimized time allocation maximizes the common throughput.

The scheme outperforms benchmark methods in various setups.

Abstract

This paper studies a novel user cooperation method in a wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where a pair of distributed terminal users first harvest wireless energy broadcasted by one energy node (EN) and then use the harvested energy to transmit information cooperatively to a destination node (DN). In particular, the two cooperating users exchange their independent information with each other to form a virtual antenna array and transmit jointly to the DN. By allowing each user to allocate part of its harvested energy to transmit the other's information, the proposed cooperation can effectively mitigate the user unfairness problem in WPCNs, where a user may suffer from very low data rate due to the poor energy harvesting performance and high data transmission consumptions. We derive the maximum common throughput achieved by the cooperation scheme through optimizing the time allocation on wireless energy transfer, user message exchange, and joint information transmissions. Through comparing with some representative benchmark schemes, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed user cooperation in enhancing the throughput performance under different setups.