Coverage, Secrecy, and Stability Analysis of Energy Harvesting Wireless Networks

Including energy harvesting capability in a wireless network is attractive for multiple reasons. First and foremost, powering base stations with renewable resources could significantly reduce their reliance on the traditional energy sources, thus helping in curtailing the carbon footprint. Second, including this capability in wireless devices may help in increasing their lifetime, which is especially critical for devices for which it may not be easy to charge or replace batteries. This will often be the case for a large fraction of sensors that will form the {em digital skin} of an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Motivated by these factors, this work studies fundamental performance limitations that appear due to the inherent unreliability of energy harvesting when it is used as a primary or secondary source of energy by different elements of the wireless network, such as mobile users, IoT sensors, and/or base stations.

The first step taken towards this objective is studying the joint uplink and downlink coverage of radio-frequency (RF) powered cellular-based IoT. Modeling the locations of the IoT devices and the base stations (BSs) using two independent Poisson point processes (PPPs), the joint uplink/downlink coverage probability is derived. The resulting expressions characterize how different system parameters impact coverage performance. Both mathematical expressions and simulation results show how these system parameters should be tuned in order to achieve the performance of the regularly powered IoT (IoT devices are powered by regular batteries).

The placement of RF-powered devices close to the RF sources, to harvest more energy, imposes some concerns on the security of the signals transmitted by these RF sources to their intended receivers. Studying this problem is the second step taken in this dissertation towards better understanding of energy harvesting wireless networks. While these secrecy concerns have been recently addressed for the point-to-point link, it received less attention for the more general networks with randomly located transmitters (RF sources) and RF-powered devices, which is the main contribution in the second part of this dissertation.

In the last part of this dissertation, we study the stability of solar-powered cellular networks. We use tools from percolation theory to study percolation probability of energy-drained BSs. We study the effect of two system parameters on that metric, namely, the energy arrival rate and the user density. Our results show the existence of a critical value for the ratio of the energy arrival rate to the user density, above which the percolation probability is zero. The next step to further improve the accuracy of the stability analysis is to study the effect of correlation between the battery levels at neighboring BSs. We provide an initial study that captures this correlation. The main insight drawn from our analysis is the existence of an optimal overlapping coverage area for neighboring BSs to serve each other's users when they are energy-drained.