Wireless information and power transfer for IoT applications in overlay cognitive radio networks

© 2014 IEEE. This paper proposes and investigates an overlay spectrum sharing system in conjunction with the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer to enable communications for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Considered is a cooperative cognitive radio network, where two IoT devices (IoDs) exchange their information and also provide relay assistance to a pair of primary users (PUs). Different from most existing works, in this paper, both IoDs can harvest energy from the radio-frequency signals received from the PUs. By utilizing the harvested energy, they provide relay cooperation to PUs and realize their own communications. For harvesting energy, a time-switching-based approach is adopted at both IoDs. With the proposed scheme, one round of bidirectional information exchange for both primary and IoT systems is performed in four phases, i.e., one energy harvesting phase and three information processing phases. Both IoDs rely on the decode-and-forward operation to facilitate relaying, whereas the PUs employ selection combining technique. For investigating the performance of the considered network, this paper first provides exact expressions of user outage probability (OP) for the primary and IoT systems under Nakagami-m fading. Then, by utilizing the expressions of user OP, the system throughput and energy efficiency are quantified together with the average end-to-end transmission time. Numerical and simulation results are provided to give useful insights into the system behavior and to highlight the impact of various system/channel parameters.