RF energy harvesting and information transmission based on NOMA for wireless powered IoT relay systems

Abstract

Amidst the rapid development of the fifth generation (5G) networks, Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as one of the most important part of 5G next generation networks as it can support massive object communications. These massive object communications in the context of IoT is expected to consume a huge power. Furthermore, IoT sensors or devices are rather power constrained and are mostly battery operated. Therefore, energy efficiency of such network of IoT devices is a major concern. On the other hand, energy harvesting (EH) is an emerging paradigm that allows the wireless nodes to recharge themselves through radio frequency (RF) signals directed to them from the source node and then relaying or transmitting the information. Although a myriad of works have been carried out in the literature for EH, the vast majority of those works only consider RF EH at the relay node and successfully transmitting the source node data. Those approaches do not consider the data transmission of the relay node that may be an energy deprived IoT node which needs to transmit its own data along with the source node data to their respective destination nodes. Therefore, in this paper, we envisioned a RF EH and information transmission system based on time switching (TS) relaying, power splitting (PS) relaying and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) which is suitable for wireless powered IoT relay systems. A source node information data is relayed through power constrained IoT relay node IoTR that first harvests the energy from source node RF signal using either TS and PS relaying protocol and then transmits the source node information along with its information using NOMA protocol to the respective destination nodes. Considering NOMA as a transmission protocol, we have mathematically derived analytical expressions for TS and PS relaying protocol for our proposed system. We have also formulated an algorithm to find out optimal TS and PS factor that maximizes the sum-throughput for our proposed system. Our proposed system analytical results for TS and PS protocol are validated by the simulation results.