Design of a Hybrid Wireless Powered Communication Network with Power Control for Self-Powered Devices

A wireless-powered communication network (WPCN) is a widely studied technology in many fields and applications. These studies use two models regarding the locations of the power transmitter or energy transmitter and the information receiver. The WPCN with colocated energy transmitter and information receiver model suffers from the doubly near-far problem, where a user that is far away from its associated hybrid access point (HAP) harvests less energy but may consume more energy to transmit data than a user nearer to the HAP. While the WPCN with a separated energy transmitter and information receiver model provides better user fairness among users, but it degrades the total system throughput. However, because these models rely on fixed resource allocation, they are unsuitable for achieving user fairness and the system's maximum data rate. In this paper, a hybrid architecture is designed and developed with power control between the HAP and power beacon (PB) to provide the best exchange between the system data rate and the user's fairness. Particularly, the power control factor is optimized dynamically to ensure maximum network performance at all times. This strategy enables maximum utilization of network performance at all times, and is very useful and effective with mobile devices. Where the largest part of the energy is transferred to the devices through HAP, if most devices are close to HAP, and the largest part of the energy is transferred to the devices through PB, if most devices are close to PB. In addition, another scenario from the WPCN separated model is considered when locating the PB at the center of the distance between the HAP and cell edge. This scenario provides a data rate very close to that is provided by the WPCN colocated model and user's fairness close to that is provided by the WPCN separated model.