Reliability-Oriented Resource Allocation for Wireless Powered Short Packet Communications With Multiple WPT Sources

We study a multi-source wireless power transfer (WPT) enabled network supporting multi-sensor transmissions. Activated by the energy harvesting from multiple WPT sources, the sensors transmit short packets to a destination with finite blocklength (FBL) codes. This work for the first time characterizes the FBL reliability for such multi-source WPT enabled network and accordingly provides reliability-oriented resource allocation designs, while a practical nonlinear EH model (including the effects of mutual interference among multiple RF signals) is considered. For the scenario with a fixed frame structure, we aim to maximize the FBL reliability via optimally allocating the transmit power among the multiple WPT sources. In particular, we investigate the relationship between the overall error probability and the transmit power of multiple WPT sources, based on which a power allocation problem is formulated. To solve the formulated non-convex problem, we first introduce auxiliary variables to make the problem analytically tractable, based on which an iterative algorithm is proposed while applying successive convex approximation (SCA) technique to the non-convex components of the problem. Then, we extend our design into a dynamic frame structure scenario, i.e., the blocklength allocated for WPT phase and short-packet transmission phase are adjustable, which introduces more flexibility and new challenges. In particular, we provide a joint power and blocklength allocation design maximizing the overall reliability under total power and blocklength constraints. A problem with high-dimension variables is formulated, which suffers from the complex and non-convex relationship among system reliability, multiple source power and blocklength. To tackle the difficulties, auxiliary variables introduction, multiple variable substitutions along with SCA technique utilization are exploited to reformulate and efficiently solve the problem. Finally, through numerical results, we validate our analytical model and evaluate the system performance, where a set of guidelines for practical system design are concluded.