Cooperative Strategies for Wireless-Powered Communications: An Overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews cooperative strategies in wireless-powered communication, focusing on relaying, spectrum sharing, and security, highlighting recent advances and future research directions in RF energy transfer and harvesting.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of cooperative schemes in wireless-powered communication, emphasizing relaying, spectrum sharing, and security strategies, and identifies key future research directions.

Findings

Analysis of relaying protocols for wireless-powered networks

Overview of spectrum sharing schemes in cognitive wireless-powered systems

Discussion of cooperative jamming for secure wireless-powered communications

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) energy transfer and harvesting has been intensively studied recently as a promising approach to significantly extend the lifetime of energy-constrained wireless networks. This technique has a great potential to provide relatively stable and continuous RF energy to devices wirelessly; it thus opened a new research paradigm, termed wireless-powered communication (WPC), which has raised many new research opportunities with wide applications. Among these, the design and analysis of cooperative schemes towards efficient WPC have attracted tremendous research interests nowadays. This article provides an overview of various cooperative strategies for WPC, with particular emphasis on relaying protocols for wireless-powered cooperative communications, cooperative spectrum sharing schemes for cognitive wireless-powered networks, and cooperative jamming strategies towards wireless-powered secure communications. We also identify several interesting research directions in this area before concluding this article.