In this paper, we investigate a wireless-powered relays assisted batteryless IoT network based on the non-linear energy harvesting model, where there exists an energy service provider constituted by the hybrid access point (HAP) and an IoT service provider constituted by multiple clusters. The HAP provides energy signals to the batteryless devices for information backscattering and the wireless-powered relays for energy harvesting. The relays are deployed to assist the batteryless devices with the information transmission to the HAP by using the harvested energy. To model the energy interactions between the energy service provider and IoT service provider, we propose a Stackelberg game based framework. We aim to maximize the respective utility values of the two providers. Since the utility maximization problem of the IoT service provider is non-convex, we employ the fractional programming theory and propose a block coordinate descent (BCD) based algorithm with successive convex approximation (SCA) and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques to solve it. Numerical simulation results confirm that compared to the benchmark schemes, our proposed scheme can achieve larger utility values for both the energy service provider and IoT service provider.

This paper proposes the mesh-topology based wireless-powered communication network (MT-WPCN), which consists of a hybrid-access point (H-AP) and nodes. The H-AP broadcasts energy to all nodes by wireless, and the nodes harvest the energy and then communicate with other nodes including the H-AP. For the communication in the MT-WPCN, we propose the harvest-then-transceive protocol to ensure that the nodes can harvest energy from the H-AP and transmit information selectively to the H-AP or other nodes, which is not supported in most protocols proposed for the conventional WPCN. In the proposed protocol, we consider that the energy harvesting can be interrupted at nodes, since the nodes cannot harvest energy during transmission or reception. We also consider that the harvested energy is consumed by the reception of information from other nodes. In addition, the energy reservation model is required to guarantee the QoS, which reserves the infimum energy to receive information reliably by the transmission power control. Under these considerations, first, we design the half harvest-then-transceive protocol, which indicates that a node transmits information only to other nodes which do not transmit information yet, for investing the effect of the energy harvesting interruption. Secondly, we also design the full harvest-then-transceive protocol for the information exchange among nodes and compatibility with the conventional star-topology based WPCN, which indicates that a node can transmit information to any network unit, i.e., the H-AP and all nodes. We study the sum-throughput maximization in the MT-WPCN based on the half and full harvest-then-transceive protocols, respectively. Furthermore, the amount of harvested energy is analytically compared according to the energy harvesting interruption in the protocols. Simulation results show that the proposed MT-WPCN outperforms the conventional star-topology based WPCN in terms of the sum-throughput maximization, when wireless information transmission among nodes occurs frequently.

In this paper, we propose a multi-cell structure backscatter based wireless-powered communication network (WPCN) where a number of backscatter cells are locally separated, each containing a subset of users around a carrier emitter. The multi-cell structure backscatter based WPCN can be implemented in two ways, namely time-division multiplexing (TDM) and frequency-division multiplexing (FDM). Here users harvest energy from the carrier signal transmitted by the carrier emitter, and then transmit their own information in a passive way via the reflection of the carrier signal using frequency-shift keying modulation. We characterize the energy-free condition and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage zone in a backscatter based WPCN. Also, a backscatter based harvest-then-transmit protocol is adopted to maximize the sum-throughput of all users by optimally allocating time for energy harvesting and information transmission. Numerical results demonstrate that the backscatter based WPCN ensures an increased long-range coverage and a diminished SNR outage zone compared to conventional radio based WPCNs. Also, comparing the two types of multi-cell structure backscatter based WPCN, TDM within each backscatter cell and FDM across backscatter cells versus FDM within each backscatter cell and TDM across backscatter cells, numerical results confirm that which one yields a better performance.