Sensors, Vol. 18, Pages 3560: Resource Management in Energy Harvesting Cooperative IoT Network under QoS Constraints (Sensors)

Cooperative communication with RF energy harvesting relays has emerged as a promising technique to improve the reliability, coverage, longevity and capacity of future IoT networks. An efficient relay assignment with proper power allocation and splitting is required to satisfy the network’s QoS requirements. This work considers the resource management problem in decode and forward relay based cooperative IoT network. A realistic mathematical model is proposed for joint user admission, relay assignment, power allocation and splitting ratio selection problem. The optimization problem is a mixed integer non-linear problem (MINLP) whose objective is to maximize the overall sum rate (bps) while satisfying the practical network constraints. Further, an outer approximation algorithm is adopted which provides epsilon-optimal solution to the problem with guaranteed convergence and reasonable complexity. Simulations of the proposed solution are carried out for various network scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate that cooperative communication with diversity achieves a better admission of IoT users and increases not only their individual data rates but also the overall sum rate of an IoT network.