2 research outputs found
Wireless Communication Networks Powered by Energy Harvesting
This thesis focuses on the design, analysis and optimization of
various energy-constrained wireless communication systems powered
by energy harvesting (EH). In particular, we consider ambient EH
wireless sensor networks, wireless power transfer (WPT) assisted
secure communication network, simultaneous wireless information
and power transfer (SWIPT) systems, and WPT-based backscatter
communication (BackCom) systems.
First, we study the delay issue in ambient EH wireless sensor
network for status monitoring application scenarios. Unlike most
existing studies on the delay performance of EH sensor networks
that only consider the energy consumption of transmission, we
consider the energy costs of both sensing and transmission. To
comprehensively study the delay performance, we consider two
complementary metrics and analyze their statistics: (i) update
age - measuring how timely the updated information at the sink
is, and (ii) update cycle - measuring how frequently the
information at the sink is updated. We show that the
consideration of sensing energy cost leads to an important
tradeoff between the two metrics: more frequent updates result in
less timely information available at the sink.
Second, we study WPT-assisted secure communication network.
Specifically, we propose to use a wireless-powered friendly
jammer to enable low-complexity secure communication between a
source node and a destination node, in the presence of an
eavesdropper. We propose a WPT-assisted secure communication
protocol, and analytically characterize its long-term behavior.
We further optimize the encoding-rate parameters for maximizing
the throughput subject to a secrecy outage probability
constraint. We show that the throughput performance differs
fundamentally between the single-antenna jammer case and the
multi-antenna jammer case.
Third, exploiting the fact that the radio-frequency (RF) signal
can carry both information and energy, we study a point-to-point
simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)
system adopting practical M-ary modulation for both the
power-splitting (PS) and the time-switching (TS) receiver
architectures. Unlike most existing studies, we take into account
the receiver’s sensitivity level of the RF-EH circuit. We show
several interesting results, such as for the PS scheme,
modulations with high peak-to-average power ratio achieve better
EH performance. Then, inspired by the PS-based SWIPT receiver, we
propose a novel information receiver, which involves joint
processing of coherently and non-coherently received signals, and
hence, creates a three-dimensional received signal space. We show
that the achievable rate of a splitting receiver provides a 50%
rate gain compared to either the conventional coherent or
non-coherent receiver in the high SNR regime.
Last, we propose the design of WPT-based full-duplex backscatter
communication (BackCom) networks for energy-constrained
Internet-of-Things applications, where a novel multiple-access
scheme based on time-hopping spread-spectrum (TH-SS) is designed
to enable both one-way power transfer and two-way information
transmission in coexisting backscatter reader-tag links.
Comprehensive performance analysis of BackCom networks is
presented. We show some interesting design insights, such as: a
longer TH-SS sequence reduces the bit error rates (BERs) of the
two-way information transmission but results in lower
energy-harvesting rate at the tag; a larger number of BackCom
links improves the energy-harvesting rate at the tags but also
increase the BERs for the information transmission