Combining RF energy harvesting and cooperative communications for low-power wide-area systems

This paper presents the combination of energy harvesting (EH) at the wireless sensor and cooperative communications for low-power wide-area (LPWA) systems. Firstly, the Internet of Things sensor harvests the energy from the power beacon with multiple transmit antennas via radio frequency signals and then uses the harvested energy to transmit signals to multiple gateways with multiple receive antennas. Then, the cooperative communications is applied at the server based on the gateway outputs. By mathematical analysis, we derive the exact closed-form expressions of outage probabilities (OPs), throughput, and symbol error probabilities (SEPs) of the EH-LPWA system over Nakagami-m fading channel in the cases without and with cooperative communications. Our expressions can be considered as the first results applying EH for LPWA systems with mathematical analysis. Then, we obtain the optimal value of the time switching ratio that minimizes the OPs and SEPs and maximizes the throughput of the considered EH-LPWA system. Numerical results have clarified that, the distances, path loss exponent, and data transmission rate have a strong impact on the OPs, throughput, and SEPs. Particularly, using a half of transmission blocks for EH can maximize the system performance. Moreover, when the number of transmit antennas at power beacon is equal to the number of receive antennas at gateways, the system performance can be improved significantly. Finally, the accuracy of the obtained expressions is demonstrated via Monte-Carlo simulations. © 2021 Elsevier GmbH