Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Wireless Sensor Networks with Fountain Codes

Energy is a key constraint for spatial broadly deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs). With the rapid development of energy harvesting technology, a new technique named simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has been proposed and became a research hotspot since its effectiveness for solving the problem of energy shortage in WSNs. Most existing SWIPT mechanisms are based on time switching (TS) or power splitting (PS), which are of high complexity, poor adaption and difficult to implement and popularize. In this paper, we proposed a new information/energy splitting mechanism named packets splitting mechanism, which can adaptively divide data packets into the energy data packets and the information data packets with the exploitation of fountain codes according to the real-time decoding state information of nodes. We illustrate the proposed mechanism in a typical relay system. The experiment results show that the proposed method can maximize achievable information rate by balancing information rate and energy efficiency.