Zero-Energy Computation Offloading with Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer for Two-Hop 6G Fog Networks

Daniele Tarchi,Mulubrhan Desta Gebremeskel,Arash Bozorgchenani

doi:10.3390/en15051632

Abstract

Currently, we are faced with an ever-increasing number of devices and objects connected to the Internet aimed at creating the so-called Internet of Things framework, fostering the creation of a connected world of objects. One of the main challenges we are actually facing is constituted by the constrained sizes of such objects: reduced memory, reduced computational capacity, and reduced battery sizes. Particular attention should be devoted to energy efficiency, since a potential energy shortage would negatively impact not only its operation but also network-wide operation, considering the tight connections among any object. According to the 6G system’s use-case related to self-sustainability and zero-energy networks, this paper focuses on an energy-efficient fog network architecture for IoT scenarios, jointly implementing computation offloading operations and simultaneous wireless information and power Transfer (SWIPT), hence, enabling the possibility of jointly transferring energy and computational tasks among the nodes. The system under consideration is composed of three nodes, where an access point (AP) is considered to be always connected to the power network, while a relay node and an end node can harvest energy from the AP. The proposed solution allows to jointly optimize the computation offloading and the energy harvesting phases while maximizing the network lifetime, so as to maximize the operational time of the network. Numerical results obtained on MATLAB demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than the other benchmarks considered for comparison.

Highlights

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralIn the modern-day digital era, the number of wireless devices becoming part of the connected world is ever increasing
Most of the wireless devices are small in size, with limited computational capacity, and with a limited energy source [1]
The objective of the work is to develop an algorithm that outlines the thresholds for computation offloading, while in reference [32], we defined the main elements of the fog architecture for joint offloading and simultaneous wireless information and power Transfer (SWIPT) limited to a two-nodes scenario; in this work, a more general scenario is considered, where an intermediate node is used for both energy transfer and computation offloading

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralIn the modern-day digital era, the number of wireless devices becoming part of the connected world is ever increasing. Most of the wireless devices are small in size, with limited computational capacity, and with a limited energy source [1] When these devices have some intensive jobs to process, due to their limited computing capacity they require a long processing time, which will indirectly consume a huge amount of energy. Despite the superior services that cloud computing provides to end-users, it has a very serious limitation: the connectivity between the end devices and the cloud is over the Internet, and the distance between them can be thousands of kilometers. This cripples the communication for delay-sensitive cloud-based applications, such as connected vehicles, fire detection and firefighting, smart grid, and content delivery applications

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion