New RF energy harvesting models for next-generation wireless communication systems

Abstract

Deployment of massive sensor and Internet of Things (IoT) devices in next-generation wireless communication systems reveals energy limitations as one of the challenges. Typically, IoT devices are powered by a battery, which restricts their capacity and working time. Energy harvesting (EH) has been regarded as a promising approach which can increase the life-time of a wireless communication system. In EH, energy is obtained by wind, solar, vibration, etc. Thus, the harvested energy is transformed into electricity and can be used by the desired nodes. However, the aforementioned traditional EH methods are not always available. Additionally, radio frequency (RF) EH has emerged as a key promising technique that enables wireless systems to harvest energy from the incoming signals in the environment. This energy is available as dedicated or ambient energy and can be harvested throughout the whole day. Hence, RF EH can be an effective alternative for empowering battery-free IoT devices, resulting in increased operational time. As RF EH methods for power-constrained nodes, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and wireless-powered communication (WPC) schemes are studied in the literature. The SWIPT scheme employs two EH receiver structures: power-splitting (PS) and time-switching (TS). The power-constraint node harvests power from the incoming signal energy in PS EH mode, with one portion of the signal power used for harvesting energy and the remainder for information processing. On the other hand, in the TS EH mode, EH and information processing (IP) are allocated to two non-overlapping time intervals, respectively. Furthermore, the amount of harvested energy is regarded as a linear or nonlinear (NL) function of the input power of the energy receiving (ER) node. The input and output powers of the EH circuit are directly proportional in the linear EH model. For the region with low input power, the NL EH model provides the same amount of energy as the linear model. However, the amount of harvested power saturates to a predefined threshold power at the high input power of the EH circuit. In this thesis, three different RF EH system models are investigated and the closed-form analytical expressions for their performances are derived. Moreover, the performance of each considered system is investigated in terms of bit error probability (BEP) and outage probability. Besides, theoretical derivation results are provided for different system parameters and supported by the Monte-Carlo simulation results. Comprehensive insights into the studied systems are provided, which broaden the view of engineers toward the EH system designs. The first section investigates the bit error rate (BER) performance of a full-duplex (FD) overlay cognitive radio (CR) network with linear/NL EH capability. The studied overlay CR network comprises of a primary transmitter/receiver (PT/PR) pair, a secondary transmitter (ST), and a secondary receiver (SR) operating in FD mode, whereby ST harvests energy from both PT and SR during the first communication time slot. In the second time slot, SR receives its signal from ST while PT sends its signal to PR. The BEP expressions for the primary/secondary users (PU/SU) are obtained analytically and verified through Monte-Carlo simulations using both linear and NL EH models at ST. Additionally, to determine the trade-off between EH and IP, corresponding system performances are evaluated with regard to a power allocation coefficient at SR. The results demonstrate that, in contrast to the non-cooperative (direct transmission) case, the proposed FD-CR system with NL EH improves the PU BEP performance. Besides, SU benefits from the licensed spectrum of PU with significant BER performance. In the second part of the thesis, the performance of a wireless-powered, two-hop, amplify-and-forward relaying system is studied when there is no direct link between the source and the destination. The power-constrained source and relay receive energy from a dedicated power beacon (PB) that broadcasts an energy-bearing signal. For both linear and NL energy harvesting models, theoretical derivations of BEP, outage probability, and throughput expressions are performed. Additionally, Monte Carlo simulations are performed to verify the theoretical results that are presented for various system parameters. The results show how the realistic NL EH model is different from the traditional linear EH model, which overestimates the performance of the system when a large amount of energy is harvested. This results in a misunderstanding of the actual performance of EH systems. However, both models operate similarly and provide appropriate results at low levels of harvested energy. In the last part of this dissertation, the performance of the proposed two novel NL EH models is analyzed in terms of average harvested power, throughput, and BEP. The system comprises a single multi-antenna power-constraint source that transmits its signal to a destination with multiple antennas while harvesting power from a dedicated PB. For a comprehensive analysis of the system, closed-form expressions are derived for Nakagami-$m$ fading channels and the special case of Rayleigh channels. In addition, for existing NL EH models, the simulation results are obtained using the Monte-Carlo method. The results provide a broader picture of EH systems and comprehensively compare the proposed NL EH models to linear, piece-wise linear, and NL EH models available in the literature. As a result, these provide better perspectives on the analysis and design of EH systems.