Relay-Energy Access Points for Internet-of-Things Wireless Energy Harvesting and Communications

We propose relay-energy access points (REAPs) as a novel Internet-of-Things (IoT) network architecture that supports wireless energy harvesting of IoT devices and long-range relay communications to data access points (DAPs). In this paper, we formulate a Stackelberg game for energy trading with the REAPs and a single relay selection (SRS) scheme for the REAP to assist communications with the DAP. We consider a harvestthen-transmit protocol in which REAPs transmit energy-bearing signals to multiple (active) IoT devices for energy harvesting. Using the harvested energy, the IoT devices then send information to the DAP via the REAP. Numerical examples highlight the effectiveness of the proposed game-theoretic solution and improvements achieved by relaying data through REAPs.