Joint Optimization on Power Allocation and Splitting for WSNs with SWIPT-Based Relay

How to prolong network lifetime has become an important issue in the design of large scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, a novel power saving scheme for conventional WSNs via simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) based relays is proposed. Unlike conventional relays based communications need extra energy supply for data forwarding, the relay applied in this paper works in an energy-free manner with the support of SWIPT. The power saving model with both power splitting (PS) and time switching (TS) based SWIPT are proposed. Then, we formulate the joint power allocation and splitting problems of SWIPT relay assisted WSNs as non-convex constrained optimization problems. Since the formulated problems are non-convex, semi-positive definite programming (SDP) algorithms are proposed to find the joint optimization on power allocation and splitting with low complexity. The simulation results show that the PS model has more advantages than the traditional direct communication model in long distance transmission. Under the same information receiving strategy, the PS model outperforms the TS model.