On the Deployment of Energy Sources in Wireless-Powered Cellular Networks

Wireless-powered cellular networks (WPCNs) are currently being investigated to ensure the reliability as well as improved battery lifetime of wireless devices. A WPCN leverages on a centralized base station (BS) that takes care of both wireless information and energy transfer. However, the harvested energy and, in turn, the spectral efficiency of uplink transmission of the users may significantly vary depending on the locations of the users and the channels used for energy and information transfer purposes. To this end, this paper theoretically characterizes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) outage zones in a WPCN and comparatively analyzes the performance of three useful configurations of dedicated energy sources that can potentially minimize the SNR outage zones. These configurations are: (i) harvesting energy from and information transfer to a full-duplex BS. This is considered as a baseline configuration; (ii) harvesting energy from symmetrically deployed power beacons (PBs) and information transfer to a conventional half-duplex BS; and (iii) harvesting energy from symmetrically deployed PBs that are colocated with the distributed antenna elements (DAEs) of a conventional half-duplex BS. For all the listed cases, we characterize the SNR outage probability and spectral efficiency of an arbitrarily located user within the cellular region. Based on the derived expressions, we also optimize the distance of the PBs from the BS to minimize the SNR outage probability and provide closed-form solutions for special cases. The optimum distance of the PBs is shown to be a function of the number of PBs and the coverage area of the BS. Numerical results validate the accuracy of the derived expressions, provide design insights related to WPCNs, and reveal the significance of the limited number of optimally placed PBs over a large number of randomly deployed PBs.