On the Coverage of UAV-Assisted SWIPT Networks With Nonlinear EH Model

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with huge-capacity batteries could be employed to wirelessly charge the ground sensor users (GSUs) and enhance the coverage of aerial wireless networks in outdoor Internet of Things (IoT). This paper investigates the information and energy coverage of UAV-enabled simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) networks. Both power splitting (PS) and time switching (TS) receiver architectures are considered. By using stochastic geometry approach, the general and explicit expressions of the information coverage probability (ICP), the energy coverage probability (ECP) and the joint information and energy coverage probability (JIECP) are derived under the nonlinear and linear energy harvesting (EH) models, respectively. Particularly, the Laplace transform and the probability generating functional (PGFL) are used to derive the ICP. And, Campbell’s theorem and the maximum function are applied to obtain the ECP and the JIECP, respectively. To achieve the optimal UAVs’ deployment density, the maximization optimization problems are formulated for the PS-based and TS-based systems, respectively. By using the series expansion of
$Q(x)$
(
$Q$
-function) with large
$x$
, the closed-form approximating optimal solutions to the formulated problems are obtained. Monte Carlo simulations validate the correction of our obtained theoretical results, and numerical results show that the performance of the PS-based system is superior to that of the TS-based one. Moreover, when the energy requirement of GSUs or the transmit power of UAVs is relatively large, or when the information requirement of GSUs or the UAV deployment density is relatively small, compared with the nonlinear EH model, the analysis bias caused by traditional linear EH model is relatively large and in these cases, traditional linear EH model cannot be used to replace the nonlinear EH one for the system performance analysis or optimal system design.