Network Association Strategies for an Energy Harvesting Aided Super-WiFi Network Relying on Measured Solar Activity

Abstract

The super-WiFi network concept has been proposed for nationwide Internet access in the United States. However, the traditional mains power supply is not necessarily ubiquitous in this large-scale wireless network. Furthermore, the non-uniform geographic distribution of both the based-stations and the tele-traffic requires carefully considered user association. Relying on the rapidly developing energy harvesting techniques, we focus our attention on the sophisticated access point (AP) selection strategies conceived for the energy harvesting aided super-WiFi network. Explicitly, we propose a solar radiation model relying on the historical solar activity observation data provided by the University of Queensland, followed by a beneficial radiation parameter estimation method. Furthermore, we formulate both a Markov decision process (MDP) as well as a partially observable MDP (POMDP) for supporting the users’ decisions on beneficially selecting APs. Moreover, we conceive iterative algorithms for implementing our MDP and POMDP-based AP-selection, respectively. Finally, our performance results are benchmarked against a range of traditional decision-making algorithms.