Joint time-slot and power allocation algorithm for data and energy integrated networks supporting internet of things (IoT)

Abstract

IoT is an essential enabler for smart cities and smart society. However, its deployment at large scale faces a big challenge: battery replacement as most IoT devices are battery-powered or even battery-less. In a hostile environment, it is infeasible to replace batteries. Radio frequency (RF)-enable wireless energy transfer (WET) is a promising technology to solve this problem. Since RF is also used for wireless data communication, a data and energy integrated network (DEIN) is the way forward. Based on the DEIN technology, a time allocation model is designed in this paper to manage the RF energy and uplink data transmission in different time slots. In the IoT scenario, the DEIN's primary service is to collect environmental information such as temperature, humidity, and luminance. Therefore, the uplink data transmission of the battery-powered/battery-less IoT nodes deserves more attention. To increase the uplink data transmission in case of consuming less energy in the DEIN system, we propose a joint time slot and power allocation algorithm to minimize the system's consumed energy for transmitting per bit of uplink data. It aims to maximize the efficiency of the DEIN system's energy utilization, which helps to achieve an energy-efficient DEIN.