A Framed Slotted ALOHA-Based MAC for Eliminating Vain Wireless Power Transfer in Wireless Powered IoT Networks

Abstract

Multiple access control (MAC) is crucial for devices to send data packets and harvest wireless energy in wireless powered Internet of Things (IoT) networks. A framed slotted ALOHA (FSA) protocol is employed in several practical networks. This paper studies an FSA-based MAC in a centralized wireless powered IoT network, including half-duplex devices and a full-duplex base station transmitting wireless energy in an intended direction. Under such a network, it is possible that a half-duplex device contends for a time slot to transmit a packet while the base station transmits wireless energy to the device in the same time slot, which causes vain charging and wastes the opportunity to charge other devices. To eliminate the vain charging, this paper designs a MAC in which a base station utilizes the information conveyed from devices in advance to arrange the charging order of devices. The novelty is to develop an algorithm to find a charging order of half-duplex devices instead of using full-duplex devices to eliminate the vain charging. Event-driven simulations are conducted to study the performance of the proposed MAC. Simulation results show that the proposed MAC produces better system performances than the system not eliminating the vain charging. In summary, the application of the proposed MAC yields the benefits of higher throughput and lower packet loss.