Modelling and Performance Analysis of Wireless LAN Enabled by RF Energy Transfer

RF signals can be relied upon for transferring energy to those power-thirsty wireless devices. Thanks to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, dedicated RF signals for delivering information to specific devices can also be received by others for energy harvesting. Coordinating the conventional wireless information transfer and the wireless energy transfer (WET) requires a systematic design in all OSI layers, which yields data and energy integrated communication networks. Based on the classic carrier-sense-multiple-access with collision avoidance protocol, we originally propose a distributed multiple access protocol in the medium access control (MAC) layer for the indoor wireless-local-area-network (WLAN) powered by RF signal-based WET. The operation of our proposed protocol in the WET powered indoor WLAN is modeled by a multi-dimensional Markov chain, which is exploited for deriving the closed-form throughput of the WLAN studied. The simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis, which pave the way for the future optimization design in the MAC layer of WET powered indoor WLAN.