Wireless Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks: Boolean–Poisson Modeling and Analysis

Abstract

Wireless radio frequency energy harvesting has been adopted in wireless networks as a method to supply energy to wireless nodes. In this paper, we analyze a wireless energy harvesting network based on a Boolean-Poisson model. This model assumes that energy sources are distributed according to a Poisson point process and have disc-shaped coverage regions with random radii. We introduce a distribution for the coverage radii, which takes aggregated harvested power into account. The union of the coverage regions of the energy sources forms the energy harvesting zone. We derive the transmission success probability of single-hop networks characterized by the probability that two sensor nodes are located in the energy harvesting zone. Then, we analyze the performance of multi-hop networks in the cases, where the locations of the sensor nodes are either fixed or randomly distributed. Moreover, we consider a star-shaped topology, which reflects the scenario wherein some sensor nodes simultaneously transmit data to a data collector. In this setting, we derive an approximation of the average throughput at the data collector. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our analysis in the single-hop and multi-hop networks and confirm the tightness of our approximation in the case of the star-shaped topology.