In Internet of Things, wireless access networks are required to support a large number of user equipments (UEs) in real time. With UEs' frequently arrival and departure, plenty of packet collisions can occur. Successive decoding thus becomes a promising technique to support the massive connectivity as it is capable of recovering packets from mixed received signals. In this paper, we propose an adaptive framing with successive decoding (AFSD) frame structure to deal with the fluidity of UEs. In the AFSD structure, the frame length is adaptively adjusted based on the present UE number, and successive decoding is adopted to alleviate the packet loss caused by packet collision. To quantify its performance, we provide exact as well as asymptotic results for the average delay. The analytical results are validated by simulations, and further extended to practical systems with estimated UE number, which shows that knowledge of active UE number is useful for delay reduction. Optimizations on UE transmission probability and frame length are also presented. In particular, the numerical studies reveal that by using optimized parameters, the average delay is reduced significantly for a wide range of arrival rates, which validates the effectiveness of the AFSD structure.

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is emerging as a promising paradigm that provides sustainability for pervasive battery-powered devices to complete various tasks. Due to high attenuation of WET, it is crucial to design new architecture that conserves energy while guaranteeing task completion. In this paper, we propose an energy bank-based crowdsourcing framework and an incentive mechanism for energy conservation in wireless-powered task-oriented networks. An employer device outsources the whole or a part of its task to several worker devices and pays them energy as reward. Through energy-service trading, the employer consumes less energy and workers make energy profits. The virtual energy bank keeps accounts for all devices, authenticates the trading, and settles payments through a lossless bookkeeping-like manner. We analyze the employer's expense-minimized and workers' profit-maximized decisions and prove that the optimal decisions compose a Stackelberg equilibrium. To quantify the potential in energy saving, we further apply the framework to a relay-based sensor network where a source employs relays to forward data with a minimum rate requirement. An algorithm is developed for the NP-hard expense minimization problem. The simulation results reveal that our proposed framework and mechanism improve the energy efficiency by providing a win-win situation for both sides.

In this paper, we study wireless energy transfer-enabled passive communication networks, where passive nodes (PNs) harvest radio frequency (RF) energy emitted by an active node (AN) and/or scatter the RF wave to a receiver for data transfer. The performance of such networks highly depends on channel state information (CSI), but its acquisition is quite challenging since energy-and-hardware constrained PNs are generally unable to estimate or feedback CSI. We propose a harvest-while-scatter protocol, where every PN uses the time when other PNs scatter to harvest RF energy, while only introducing minimum interference. Furthermore, we develop a channel training approach for this protocol to estimate means and (co)variances of channel gains via collecting and utilizing historical data and energy transmissions. To minimize the energy consumed at the AN with limited statistical CSI, we formulate a distributionally robust energy minimization problem involving a non-convex objective function and a quality-of-service chance constraint. In addition, we develop an iterative algorithm to optimally solve it with low complexity. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed protocol and algorithm, and reveal the effect of relative node locations on energy consumption in terms of energy harvesting and data transfer.

In Internet of Things, wireless access networks need to support a large number of user equipments (UEs) in real time, where UEs frequently arrive and leave and plenty of packet collisions occur. In this paper, we propose a protocol termed adaptive framing with successive decoding (AFSD), that not only supports vast connectivity but also involves little signalling overhead. By using AFSD, the frame length can be adaptively adjusted based on the present UE number to deal with the fluidity of UEs, and successive decoding is adopted to recover signal from the mixed received signal to alleviate the packet collision. We explicitly analyze the average delay of our protocol. Numerical results verify the accuracy of our analysis, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed protocol on handling massive access.

Wireless energy transfer (WET) has received considerable attention for green communications. Unbalanced energy distribution and performance outages bring difficulties to the application of WET. This paper considers a network consisting of a WET-enabled access point (AP) and several energy-harvesting and source-powered user equipments (UEs). We investigate time-frequency resource allocation of downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) wireless information transfer (WIT) and DL WET. To improve energy efficiency and resource utilization, WET and WIT are orthogonally assigned at a low-frequency narrowband and a high-frequency wideband, respectively. A practical energy harvesting model is adopted, where power conversion efficiency depends on the received power instead of being a constant. To meet UEs' different energy demands with the highest conversion efficiency, we develop beam switching, where the AP employs beamforming to charge UEs by jointly controlling power and time based on energy distributions and channel conditions. We formulate the overall energy minimization as a non-convex stochastic optimization problem, which is decomposed by fixing DL-UL time allocation ratio, transformed through Markov decision processes, and finally solved via linear programming. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme on energy conservation and reveal the tradeoff of time allocation between DL and UL.

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.