Abstract
This paper proposes a novel multi-path and multi-hop wireless powered sensor network in case of hardware impairment, constituting an energy node, one source node, single sink node, and a series of distributed relay sensor nodes, where the energy node transmits wireless energy to all terminals in the first stage, and the relay sensor nodes relay the information of the source node to the sink node in the second stage. There exists M available paths between the source node and sink node, one of which is chosen for serving source-sink communication. To enhance the minimum achievable data rate, we propose a multi-hop communication protocol based on time-division-multiple-access and an optimal throughput path algorithm. We formulate the time allocation optimization problem about energy and information transmission of the proposed multi-hop cooperation, and confirm through abundant simulation experiments that the proposed scheme can availably improve user unfairness and spectral efficiency, and thus enhance its throughput performance.
Keywords
Introduction
With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), the number of various terminals connected to the network has exploded exponentially. According to global system for mobile communication (GSM) association, the number of IoT devices (both cellular and non-cellular) will reach 25.2 billion in 2025. 1 Wireless sensor network (WSN) is one of the key core technologies of IoT, the research and development of which has been concerned by a wide range of scholars and researchers, and has a huge market potential in the future.2,3 WSN is a self-organizing network composed of low-cost and low-power micro-sensors distributed in the monitored area, which is composed of radio Communication.4,5 The purpose of WSN is to perceive, collect, process, and transmit information of perception and objects in the coverage area of the network. At present, WSN technology has been integrated into every aspect of human life, such as intelligent transportation, intelligent home, battlefield detection, target tracking, environmental monitoring, health monitoring, public safety and medical services, emergency positioning and navigation, and other fields.6–8 WSN technology has played an extremely important role in the outbreak control of COVID 19. 9 As the basic technology and core component of epidemic data collection, the critical role of sensors is incomparable.
However, most sensors are powered by batteries so far, which exists many shortcomings. For instance, the batteries need to be powered manually or replaced manually. In many scenarios, the monitoring environment of the nodes is harsh and their batteries cannot be replaced in time, which will cause the operational disruptions of WSN. Besides, the nodes are high running cost, unportable, easy interruption, and even not used in some special applications, such as medical electronic sensors implanted in human body and sensors implanted in building concrete structure, so that the lifetime of the network is greatly limited. Therefore, in order to address this issue, many scholars proposed to power wireless devices with dedicated wireless power transfer (WPT) technology, and provide continuous and stable microwave energy for the wireless devices through air medium. The utilization of WPT technology can reduce the cost of battery replacement/recharging, and enhance the quality of communication service by reducing power outage.9–13
WPT technology has become one of the important research field both at home and abroad in more than one university research teams, such as: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University, Princeton University, etc., as well as the focus of international industry development technical objects, for instance, the United States called Power cast company development of radio frequency (RF) charging suite and Intel’s wireless identification perceive RF energy transmission development platform, and so on.
Academically, many researchers have studied the application of WPT technology in wireless communication network,14–18 for example, 14 investigated the performance of WSNC based on average of information (AoI) which had the function of WPT, including the sensor nodes harvested energy from the RF signal (by the dedicated energy sources transfer) to transmit real-time status to update, concluded that the simple closed form expressions of AoT, and indicated that the size of the capacitor played a critical role in the system performance through one dimensional optimization. 15 Studied the performance of wireless powered sensor network (WPSN) under various parameter settings through simulation, discussed the influence of wireless charging rate and battery capacity on the probability of packet delay and energy shortage on wireless sensor nodes, and by the simulation showed that the greater the battery capacity or wireless charging rate, the better the performance of WPSN. Under the condition of the eavesdropper and hardware noise, 16 put forward the best path selection protocol to improve the consideration of energy harvesting system security performance and hardware damage through simulations in a multi-hop multi-path collaborative WSN. 17 considered the WPSN with one base station and multiple energy receivers, studied the formulation of the optimal power allocation problem by the multi-antenna base station in the process of the energy beamforming and pilot transfer, and given the nonlinear energy harvesting node, proposed a solving method based on binary search and iteration feasibility test, which improved the rate of about 10% of the network awareness by simulations, compared with fixed power allocation method. In order to enhance channel utilization and prolong the network lifetime, 18 studied the cooperation between multi-hop wireless rechargeable sensor network and continuous interference elimination technology.
However, almost all published references assume that hardware transceivers for wireless devices are perfect so far. While, the physical transceivers of low-cost sensor nodes are often affected by factors such as phase noise, nonlinear amplification amplitude and in-phase/orthogonal imbalance, which can significantly lower the performance of wireless networks.18,19 Therefore, the research on WPSN and the exploration of the key technology of resource optimal allocation are still in the initial stage under the condition of imperfect hardware.
This paper considers a novel multi-path and multi-hop WPSN consisting of an energy node (EN), a source node, a sink node, and a series of relay sensor nodes (RSNs), as shown in Figure 1, where first the EN broadcasts wireless energy to the source node and RSNs, then the source node utilizes energy harvested from the EN to transfer its own information to the RSNs, and finally the RSNs forward the received information to the sink node. The main contributions of this article can be summarized as follows. Input the material as simply as possible and do not embed special formatting in the text, such as field codes.

System model for the multi-hop and multi-path WPSN.
The main contributions of this article are shown below.
To solve the problem of traditional WSN relying on manual battery replacement, we propose a novel model of wireless powered sensor network by introducing WPT into wireless sensor network, thus extending the network lifetime.
In view of the imperfect hardware, we propose the optimal path algorithm according to the real-time location of the EN, source node, sink node, and RSNs, thus enhancing the throughput performance.
To prove the proposed scheme can availably improve user unfairness and spectral efficiency, we derive the closed form expression of minimum reachable throughput in the case of wireless flat fading channel distribution. Simulation results validate our derivation.
Modeling system
Channel model
As shown in Figure 1, the source node and sink node communicates through a multi-hop mode. In addition, M available paths exist between the source node and sink node, one of which is chosen for serving source-sink communication. It is assumed that all transmitters, including sources and RSNs, are power-limited devices; as a result, they are equipped with built-in batteries to harvest wireless energy from the EN arranged in the WPSN. We also assume that all terminals installed with one antenna are low cost and low power, and operate in a half-duplex mode, namely running on the same frequency band, where the separation of energy and information transmission is adopted a time-division duplex circuit.20,21 Therefore, data transfer is achieved by time division multiple access (TDMA) over an orthogonal time slot. 15
In this paper, let
Multi-hop communication protocol
In this subsection, we propose a multi-hop communication protocol, the operation of which in a transmission time block is depicted in Figure 2. At the beginning of a transmission block, channel estimation (CE) is performed within a fixed duration

Multi-hop communication protocol.
After the CE phase, the multi-hop communication protocol runs in two phases during each time block of duration T by TDMA. In the first phase with time duration
which T denote the total block duration (or the end-to-end delay constraint). Without loss of generality, it is assumed that T = 1 over all this full-text. The throughput performance of the multi-hop communication protocol will be derived in the next section.
Analyze throughput performance
Energy transfer
We assume that
where
The rest of time
In this paper, we use the same assumption of,
15
that is, to prevent interference, various frequency bands are adopted for energy collection and data transmission. All the nodes (i.e.,
Multi-hop data transmission
Let s denote the data of the source transmitted from the RSN
where
To account for the path loss, we can model the channel gain
where
Consequently, we can express the
where
Then, the data rate of the
Therefore, the data rate of the uth path is calculated by
Max-min throughput optimization
Problem formulation
In this paper, we assume that the source will randomly select one of the paths to transfer the data in cases where multi-path has the same number of shortest hops, and propose an optimal throughput path protocol (OTP) to optimize the performance of the WPSN, where the selected path provides the maximum data rate. Mathematically, we denote
where
Therefore, the problem can be expressed as
By introducing an auxiliary variable S, the problem (P1) can be equivalently converted into its epigraphic form
Notice that the expressions of the transmit power
Convex transformation of (P2)
The basic idea of the convex transformation is to introduce auxiliary variables to replace the fractional terms in (3) and (8). Therefore, the problem (P2) is convex one, which can be addressed to adopt the classical approach, interior point method 24 .
Numerical results
This section assesses the throughput performance of the proposed novel system model of the WPCN. All the following figures present the optimal sum throughput or minimum data rate performance of various methods. All simulations adopt the Power cast TX91501-3 W transmitter and P2110 Power harvester, respectively, as the energy transmitter at the EN with transmit power P = 3 watts (W) and the energy receiver at each WD with

Performance comparison of the various transmission methods when r = 3 meters and the cluster-to-HAP1d changes: (a) min throughput and (b) sum throughput.
In Figure 4, the average minimum data rate (max-min throughput-user fairness) and sum throughput (spectrum efficiency) are depicted as a function of energy harvesting ratio

Performance comparison of the various transmission methods when d = 9 m and the radius of the cluster r changes: (a) min throughput and (b) sum throughput.
Herein, the energy harvesting ratio
In Figure 5, we investigate the impact of the transmit power of the HAP (dB) on the value of the throughput. As expected, all the three schemes’ data rates increase as

Performance comparison of the various transmission methods when the number of WDs N changes: (a) min throughput and (b) sum throughput.
Finally, Figure 6 demonstrates the max-min and sum throughput as a function of the level of impairments

Performance comparison of the various transmission methods when
Conclusion
This paper studied a novel system model of WPCN constituting two multi-antenna HAPs and a distributed of single-antenna N WDs, where a novel multi-antenna enabled clustering-cooperation interactive communication protocol method was exploited to enhance the throughput fairness. We applied energy beamforming technology at the two HAPs with multiple antennas to reach directional energy transmission to equilibrate the WDs’ various energy consumption levels, particularly the two CHs’ high-power consumption. We formulated the problem of optimal maximum-minimization throughput among WDs through joint optimization of EB design, and the allocation of transmission time between HAPs and WDs, and transmission power of the two CHs. Many simulation results demonstrated that, compared with the representative benchmark method, the proposed system model and multi-antenna clustering-cooperation interactive communication based on time-division-multiple-access can significantly enhance user fairness and spectrum efficiency in various scenarios.
Footnotes
Handling Editor: Dr Yanjiao Chen
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was financially supported by Doctoral research project of Tongren University (trxyDH2003), Doctoral talent project of Tongren Science and Technology Bureau (No.(2020)124), and Basic Research Program of Guizhou Province-ZK[2021] General 299.
