Delay-Aware Wireless Powered Communication Networks—Energy Balancing and Optimization

In a wireless powered communication network, where user equipments (UEs) harvest radio frequency energy from an access point (AP) and send data to the AP, there exists the near-far problem with respect to energy harvesting efficiency due to UEs' random locations. In this paper, we introduce the concept of delay-aware energy balancing by minimizing the average transmission delay while taking into account the issue of unbalanced harvested energy distribution. In particular, we propose an adaptive harvest-then-cooperate protocol, where every UE first harvests the energy emitted by the AP and then sends data to the AP directly or via other UEs acting as relays in a time-division multiplexing manner. In this protocol, the AP selects the combination of transmission power and routing topology by matching load and energy distributions in the network while minimizing the average transmission delay. Furthermore, we develop a method generating scheduling schemes for this protocol to avoid data overflow in the UE relay. To determine the combination with minimum delay, we approximate the average delay as a Markov decision process and propose a low-complexity sample path-based algorithm to obtain a near-optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is able to balance the energy distribution while minimizing the transmission delay.