Energy efficiency maximization strategy for Sink node in SWIPT-enabled sensor-cloud based on optimal stopping rules

Leveraging energy harvesting abilities in wireless network devices has emerged as an effective way to prolong the lifetime of energy constrained systems. The system gains are usually optimized by designing resource allocation algorithm appropriately. However, few works focus on the interaction that channel's time-vary characters make the energy transfer inefficiently. To address this, we propose a novel system operation sequence for sensor-cloud system where the Sinks provide SWIPT for sensor nodes opportunistically during downlink phase and collect the data transmitted from sensor nodes in uplink phase. Then, the energy-efficiency maximization problem of the Sinks is presented by considering the time costs and energy consumption of channel detection. It is proved that the formulated problem is an optimal stopping process with optimal stopping rules. An optimal energy-efficiency (OEE) algorithm is designed to obtain the optimal stopping rules for SWIPT. Finally, the simulations are performed based on the OEE algorithm compared with the other two strategies to verify the effectiveness and gains in improving the system efficiency.