Abstract:
This work presents a new approach to the maximization of energy and throughput in
a wireless sensor network (WSN), with the intention of applying the approach to water-quality
monitoring. Water-quality monitoring using WSN technology has become an interesting research
area. Energy scarcity is a critical issue that plagues the widespread deployment of WSN systems.
Different power supplies, harvesting energy from sustainable sources, have been explored. However,
when energy-efficient models are not put in place, energy harvesting based WSN systems may
experience an unstable energy supply, resulting in an interruption in communication, and low
system throughput. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents the joint maximization of the
energy harvested by sensor nodes and their information-transmission rate using a sum-throughput
technique. A wireless information and power transfer (WIPT) method is considered by harvesting
energy from dedicated radio frequency sources. Due to the doubly near–far condition that confronts
WIPT systems, a new WIPT system is proposed to improve the fairness of resource utilization in
the network. Numerical simulation results are presented to validate the mathematical formulations
for the optimization problem, which maximize the energy harvested and the overall throughput
rate. Defining the performance metrics of achievable throughput and fairness in resource sharing,
the proposed WIPT system outperforms an existing state-of-the-art WIPT system, with the comparison
based on numerical simulations of both systems. The improved energy efficiency of the proposed
WIPT system contributes to addressing the problem of energy scarcity.
