A Novel Energy Conservation Scheme for IoT-Based Wireless Networks: A Use Case of E-Commerce Systems for Consumer Electronics

The emerging consumer electronic products and sensor devices are involved in data driven consumer applications. E-commerce is an important service application based on sensor Web technology. It involves networks of intelligent objects or sensor nodes for data collection and data sharing for e-commerce systems. But these massive devices involved in the huge data collection are battery limited. This puts huge energy burden on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) based wireless network. Thus, energy sustainability is very important in energy constrained IoT networks for next generation sustainable IoT support. This paper presents a wireless powered IoT network aided by self-sustainable intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). The energy is harvested by the user nodes as well as the IRSs by tuning the IRS reflection coefficients. An algorithm is proposed which associates a set of IoT nodes to each IRS such that the energy requirements and sum rate of the network are met. It is observed that the IRS-aided system with energy harvesting capabilities achieve maximum average sum rate of 20 bits/s/Hz with the proposed algorithm at base station (BS) transmit power
$P_{t}$
of 40 dBm. Further, the impact of energy harvesting on the tradeoff between required power and achieved sum rate is evaluated. The IRS-aided wireless powered system is compared with system model with no IRS and no energy harvesting case for performance evaluation. In the end, the use-case scenarios of energy efficient wireless network in e-commerce consumer electronic systems are also discussed.