Coverage Analysis of Spatially Clustered RF-Powered IoT Network

Owing to the ubiquitous availability of radio- frequency (RF) signals, RF energy harvesting is a promising candidate for powering IoT devices, some of which may be deployed at difficult-to-reach places thus making it inconvenient or even impossible to replace or recharge their batteries. In this paper, we model and analyze an IoT network which harvests RF energy and receives information from the same wireless network. In order to enable this operation, each time slot is partitioned into charging and information reception phases. For this setup, we characterize two performance metrics: (i) energy coverage, and (ii) joint signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) and energy coverage. This analysis is performed using a spatial model that captures coupling between the locations of the IoT devices and the nodes of the wireless network (referred henceforth as the IoT gateways), which is usually ignored in the existing literature. In particular, we model the locations of the IoT devices using a general Poisson cluster process (PCP) and assume that the IoT gateways (GWs) are located at the cluster centers. Our results concretely demonstrate that both energy and joint coverage probabilities decrease as the size of the clusters increases. As expected, the performance converges to the case of modeling the locations of the IoT devices and the GWs as two independent PPPs when the cluster sizes go to infinity.