Wireless Information and Power Transfer

12Wireless‐Powered Cooperative Networks with Energy Accumulation

Yifan Gu*, He Chen, and Yonghui Li

School of Electrical and Information Engineering, The University of Sydney, Australia

12.1 Introduction

Background. The energy harvesting technique has been regarded as a sustainable solution to prolonging the lifetime of energy constrained wireless networks, see [1] and references therein. Conventional studies of energy harvesting focus on collecting energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar. Very recently, radio frequency (RF) signals have been used as a new viable source for energy harvesting. In this sense, wireless signals can now be used to deliver information as well as energy. The feasibility of wireless energy transfer in practical applications has been demonstrated in [2]. Additionally, [3] has realized the successful communication between two energy harvesting nodes solely exploiting the ambient RF signals. Apart from ambient signals, dedicated power transmitters can also be deployed to implement wireless energy transfer in some applications, e.g., passive radio frequency identification (RFID) networks [4].

On the other hand, the cooperative diversity technique has drawn significant interest from the wireless communication community over the past decade. The key idea of this technique is that single‐antenna nodes can transmit signals cooperatively and create a virtual multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) array. With this technology, spatial diversity can ...