No Arabic abstract
This paper presents the first wireless and programmable neural stimulator leveraging magnetoelectric (ME) effects for power and data transfer. Thanks to low tissue absorption, low misalignment sensitivity and high power transfer efficiency, the ME effect enables safe delivery of high power levels (a few milliwatts) at low resonant frequencies (~250 kHz) to mm-sized implants deep inside the body (30-mm depth). The presented MagNI (Magnetoelectric Neural Implant) consists of a 1.5-mm$^2$ 180-nm CMOS chip, an in-house built 4x2 mm ME film, an energy storage capacitor, and on-board electrodes on a flexible polyimide substrate with a total volume of 8.2 mm$^3$ . The chip with a power consumption of 23.7 $mu$W includes robust system control and data recovery mechanisms under source amplitude variations (1-V variation tolerance). The system delivers fully-programmable bi-phasic current-controlled stimulation with patterns covering 0.05-to-1.5-mA amplitude, 64-to-512-$mu$s pulse width, and 0-to-200Hz repetition frequency for neurostimulation.
The high reflect beamforming gain of the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) makes it appealing not only for wireless information transmission but also for wireless power transfer. In this letter, we consider an IRS-assisted wireless powered communication network, where a base station (BS) transmits energy to multiple users grouped into multiple clusters in the downlink, and the clustered users transmit information to the BS in the manner of hybrid non-orthogonal multiple access and time division multiple access in the uplink. We investigate optimizing the reflect beamforming of the IRS and the time allocation among the BSs power transfer and different user clusters information transmission to maximize the throughput of the network, and we propose an efficient algorithm based on the block coordinate ascent, semidefinite relaxation, and sequential rank-one constraint relaxation techniques to solve the resultant problem. Simulation results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and have shown the impact of user clustering setup on the throughput performance of the network.
Mobile-edge computing (MEC) and wireless power transfer are technologies that can assist in the implementation of next generation wireless networks, which will deploy a large number of computational and energy limited devices. In this letter, we consider a point-to-point MEC system, where the device harvests energy from the access points (APs) transmitted signal to power the offloading and/or the local computation of a task. By taking into account the non-linearities of energy harvesting, we provide analytical expressions for the probability of successful computation and for the average number of successfully computed bits. Our results show that a hybrid scheme of partial offloading and local computation is not always efficient. In particular, the decision to offload and/or compute locally, depends on the systems parameters such as the distance to the AP and the number of bits that need to be computed.
Future IoT networks consist of heterogeneous types of IoT devices (with various communication types and energy constraints) which are assumed to belong to an IoT service provider (ISP). To power backscattering-based and wireless-powered devices, the ISP has to contract with an energy service provider (ESP). This article studies the strategic interactions between the ISP and its ESP and their implications on the joint optimal time scheduling and energy trading for heterogeneous devices. To that end, we propose an economic framework using the Stackelberg game to maximize the network throughput and energy efficiency of both the ISP and ESP. Specifically, the ISP leads the game by sending its optimal service time and energy price request (that maximizes its profit) to the ESP. The ESP then optimizes and supplies the transmission power which satisfies the ISPs request (while maximizing ESPs utility). To obtain the Stackelberg equilibrium (SE), we apply a backward induction technique which first derives a closed-form solution for the ESP. Then, to tackle the non-convex optimization problem for the ISP, we leverage the block coordinate descent and convex-concave procedure techniques to design two partitioning schemes (i.e., partial adjustment (PA) and joint adjustment (JA)) to find the optimal energy price and service time that constitute local SEs. Numerical results reveal that by jointly optimizing the energy trading and the time allocation for heterogeneous IoT devices, one can achieve significant improvements in terms of the ISPs profit compared with those of conventional transmission methods. Different tradeoffs between the ESPs and ISPs profits and complexities of the PA/JA schemes can also be numerically tuned. Simulations also show that the obtained local SEs approach the socially optimal welfare when the ISPs benefit per transmitted bit is higher than a given threshold.
In this paper, a novel intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless powered communication network (WPCN) architecture is proposed for low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, where the IRS is exploited to improve the performance of WPCN under imperfect channel state information (CSI). We formulate a hybrid access point (HAP) transmission energy minimization problem by a joint design of time allocation, HAP energy beamforming, receiving beamforming, user transmit power allocation, IRS energy reflection coefficient and information reflection coefficient under the imperfect CSI and non-linear energy harvesting model. Due to the high coupling of optimization variables, this problem is a non-convex optimization problem, which is difficult to solve directly. In order to solve the above-mentioned challenging problems, the alternating optimization (AO) is applied to decouple the optimization variables to solve the problem. Specifically, through AO, time allocation, HAP energy beamforming, receiving beamforming, user transmit power allocation, IRS energy reflection coefficient and information reflection coefficient are divided into three sub-problems to be solved alternately. The difference-of-convex (DC) programming is applied to solve the non-convex rank-one constraint in solving the IRS energy reflection coefficient and information reflection coefficient. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in reducing HAP transmission energy compared to other benchmarks.
The rapid growth of the so-called Internet of Things is expected to significantly expand and support the deployment of resource-limited devices. Therefore, intelligent scheduling protocols and technologies such as wireless power transfer, are important for the efficient implementation of these massive low-powered networks. This paper studies the performance of a wireless powered communication network, where multiple batteryless devices harvest radio-frequency from a dedicated transmitter in order to communicate with a common information receiver (IR). We investigate several novel selection schemes, corresponding to different channel state information requirements and implementation complexities. In particular, each scheme schedules the $k$-th best device based on: a) the end-to-end (e2e) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), b) the energy harvested at the devices, c) the uplink transmission to the IR, and d) the conventional/legacy max-min selection policy. We consider a non-linear energy harvesting (EH) model and derive analytical expressions for the outage probability of each selection scheme by using tools from high order statistics. %Our results show that, the performance of all the proposed schemes converges to an error floor due to the saturation effects of the considered EH model. Moreover, an asymptotic scenario in terms of the number of devices is considered and, by applying extreme value theory, the systems performance is evaluated. We derive a complete analytical framework that provides useful insights for the design and realization of such networks.