Energy Provision Minimization in Wireless Powered Communication Networks With Node Throughput Requirement

Abstract

Radio-frequency (RF) energy harvesting is one of the promising technologies in wireless networks. This paper considers wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) where one hybrid access point (H-AP) coordinates RF energy/information transmissions to/from a set of nodes. For the important type of WPCNs where the nodes have throughput requirement, we aim to minimize H-AP's energy provision (EP) via jointly optimizing the time allocation of energy/information transmissions and H-AP's transmission power while satisfying node throughput requirement. More specifically, the half-duplex WPCN is considered first. We prove that H-AP's energy transmission power must be the maximum allowed value to achieve the minimal EP, then show that the problem is convex under this condition and finally design an algorithm applying golden section search and bisection search jointly to efficiently obtain the optimal time allocation. Second, the full-duplex WPCN is considered. Its EP minimization problem is proved convex. However, due to the hardness of solving it directly, we turn to solve the feasibility problem (FP) for a given EP per unit time. We construct a convex optimization problem based on this FP and design a dual subgradient algorithm for finding its optimal solution, which indicates whether this FP is feasible. The minimal EP per unit time and its corresponding optimal solution are found by using the bisection search method. Simulation results show that, the EP-minimized schemes are able to greatly reduce H-AP's EP as compared to the baseline schemes.