Energy-Aware Routing for SWIPT in Multi-Hop Energy-Constrained Wireless Network

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) transmits information and powers wireless nodes with the same radio frequency signal. It can prolong the life time of the energy-constrained wireless nodes. Current works of SWIPT focus on one-hop and two-hop wireless network. In order to verify the performance of SWIPT in multi-hop energy-constrained wireless network (MECWN) where the energy harvested by the receiver node can be as an energy compensation for data forwarding, this paper concurrently considers SWIPT and routing selection in MECWN. To reduce the energy consumption, we first formulate the information and energy allocation problem of link in a forwarding path, which is dependent on the next-hop node, and solve it by an iterative allocation algorithm. A novel routing metric evaluates the energy consumption of link transmitted with or without SWIPT. The energy-aware SWIPT routing algorithm allocates the information and energy of link with allocation algorithm during path finding process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution that takes account of SWIPT and routing in MECWN. Our performance studies demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can effectively exploit those node resources whose energy are not enough and significantly decrease the energy consumption.