RF Energy Harvesting and Transfer for Spectrum Sharing Cellular IoT Communications in 5G Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes an energy and spectrum efficient IoT network for 5G systems where spectrum is shared with the cellular system for spectrum efficiency and energy harvesting and energy transfer are utilized for energy efficiency. The IoT network, which consists of sensor nodes and a cluster head with a reliable energy source, reuses part of the cellular band whenever the cellular network does not utilize it. The cluster head performs spectrum sensing, random scheduling of the sensor nodes, and schedules some idle time for energy transfer. The sensor nodes harvest RF energy from the cellular traffic and the transferred energy from the cluster head. Provided the sensor nodes have sufficient energy, they transmit collected sensory data when scheduled. The inter-play between the cellular and IoT network introduces trade-offs between the spectrum availability, energy availability, information, and energy transfer. This paper shows that for the same cellular traffic level, as the number of sensor nodes in the network increases, the IoT network utilization increases resulting in a multi-user gain thanks to the broadcast nature of the energy transfer. The results offer insights into different operational regimes and exposes what type of IoT applications may be feasible with such networks.