Performance Study of Wireless Powered Sensor Networks

In wireless powered sensor networks (WPSNs), wireless sensor nodes can harvest energy from ambient environment or receive energy from energy transmitters for operation. However, the energy charging/harvesting rate at wireless sensor nodes is usually unstable because of the time-varying characteristics of wireless channels. When wireless sensor nodes have data to be sent but no energy is available, the throughput and delay performance may be degraded. To find some key issues of WPSNs, this work investigates the performance of WPSNs under different parameter settings by simulations. The impact of wireless charging rate and battery capacity which is rarely considered in the literature on the delay of data packets and energy shortage probability at a wireless sensor node is studied. Simulation results show that a larger battery capacity or wireless charging rate achieves much better performance of WPSNs.