Energy-Balancing Resource Allocation for Wireless Cooperative IoT Networks With SWIPT

In this article, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based downlink simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is considered in the Internet of Things (IoT) wireless interference network, where one hybrid access point (HAP) performs both wireless power transfer (WPT) and wireless information transfer (WIT) to energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding (ID) nodes while multiple coexisting energy access points (EAPs) carry energy to EH nodes. As the transmission methodology for interference avoidance, we improve and refine the subcarrier separation (SS), which allocates the dedicated energy subcarrier set orthogonal to the information subcarrier set. Based on the modified SS, to enhance the harvested energy while minimizing the number of dedicated energy subcarriers, we design the cooperative WPT with transmit diversity and adopt the time-division multiple access scheme for multiple EH nodes. The optimal joint subcarrier, node, and power allocation problem is formulated based on the proposed transmission strategies to maximize the achievable sum rate for given energy requirement with a practical nonlinear EH model for low-power IoT nodes. However, it is difficult to obtain the global optimal solution due to the nonconvexity of the problem, so we investigate the cooperative resource allocation scheme. First, to solve the subcarrier allocation and node selection jointly, two basic methods for maximizing energy and minimizing rate loss are designed, and the additional scheme considering both energy requirement and rate-loss minimization is proposed by introducing a weighting factor for balancing the total transmit power into WPT and WIT. Then, the optimal power allocation on the allocated subcarriers and selected nodes is performed with the split transmit power. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes achieve superior rate-energy (R-E) region to conventional schemes. Our study provides useful insights on how to transmit signals for improving performance in IoT interference networks with SWIPT.