Context-Aware RF-Energy Harvesting for IoT Networks

Energy Harvesting plays a crucial role in improving the operational lifetime of IoT devices. The deployment of dedicated RF-transmitters helps in sufficient energy propagation to the sensor nodes of IoT networks. Also, energy harvesting using the deployment of such RF-transmitters is a challenging issue. In this work, two methods are proposed for the optimal placement of RF-transmitters for efficient energy harvesting in wireless sensor networks. The proposed context-aware RF-energy harvesting considers different network performance parameters such as energy-hole information, and data routing information. RF-transmitter deployment is achieved using network connectivity information in the first method. However, in the second method, node density is also considered in transmitter deployment along with its connectivity information. The RF-transmitters are deployed using the proposed methods to maximize the energy transmission in the network. The proposed methods overcome the energy-hole issue in the network by deploying only a limited number of RF-transmitters when compared to the alternative schemes in the literature. Moreover, extensive simulations are also conducted under various network scenarios to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. It is observed that the proposed RF-transmitter deployment methods improve the network performance in terms of the operational lifetime of IoT networks.