Wireless energy harvesting and information processing in cooperative wireless sensor networks

This paper considers applying simultaneously wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique to cooperative clustered wireless sensor networks, aiming at prolonging the lifetime of relay nodes and maximizing the energy efficiency of data transmission. To this end, we first formulate the energy-efficient cooperative transmission (eCotrans) problem for SWIPT as a non-convex optimization problem. By exploiting fractional programming and dual decomposition, we design a distributed iteration algorithm for power allocation, power splitting and relay selection to solve the non-convex optimization problem. Our simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithm can converge within a few iterations and provide practical insights into the effect of the number of relay nodes and the maximum transmission power allowance on energy efficiency.