This book introduces wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) as a
promising paradigm to overcome the energy bottleneck suffered by traditional
wireless communication networks as well as emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT)
networks. It selectively spans a coherent spectrum of fundamental aspects in
WPCNs, such as wireless energy transfer (WEH) techniques, radio frequency
(RF) energy harvesting receiver model, simultaneous wireless information and
power transfer (SWIPT) as well as the rate-energy tradeoff arising from the joint
transmission of information and energy using the same waveform. It also reviews
existing literature on the network models for WPCNs, including the baseline and
dual-hop WPCN models and a variety of related extensions. This book further
examines the key factors including throughput, fairness, and security that must be
taken into account for impeccable operation of WPCNs. The new IoT applications
are targeted as a key element in those factors.
This is the first book examining the current research to provide a unified view
of wireless power transfer (WPT) and information transmission in WPCNs from
a PLS perspective. Focused on designing efficient secure transmission schemes,
analyzing energy evolvement process, and evaluating secrecy outage performance
under different channel state information (CSI), the results presented in this book
shed light on how to best balance security and throughput with prudent use of
harvested energy in WPCNs.
This book could not be completed without contributions from our graduate students at the Wireless Networking Lab, Center of Excellence in Telecommunications, the University of Sydney. Our Lab’s former graduate student, Parisa Ramezani, has contributed to some of simulations and analysis provided in Chap. 3. We would like
to acknowledge all members of the Lab and the Center of Excellence. We would like
also to thank our respective families for their patience while we were preparing the
materials and scripts for this book. The book could not be materialized without the
precious support from Springer International Publishing AG and in particular Susan
Lagerstrom-Fife, as well as the production editors at Springer Nature. Finally, we
thank all researchers who will read this book, and we hope that the book provides a
useful text in their future research endeavors.