CIF: Small: Energy-neutral Massively Large Wireless Networks

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Energy-harvesting and wireless power transfer are quickly becoming game-changing technologies for wireless systems by opening the exciting possibility to build self-sustainable, maintenance-free networks of perpetually communicating devices. In a harvesting wireless device, energy is a random and dynamic quantity that is continuously generated and consumed, and this leads to a fundamental shift in communication system design principles. The broad goal of this project is to lay the theoretical foundations for communication system design under such random energy dynamics. This foundation can enable optimal trade-offs between cost, size, energy and performance in the design of these wireless devices and is critical to scale them to trillions to enable the true emergence of Internet of Everything. The project also promotes the training of research engineers through a plan that envisions close interaction with system and device groups at the home institution. The project consists of three parts. The first part focuses on a point-to-point channel where the transmission energy is provided by an external random energy arrival process. The project develops a framework for approximating the capacity of this channel with explicit guarantees on the approximation gap. The second part looks at remotely powered communication, where the external energy arrival process at the transmitter can be partially controlled by a remote energy source. It develops an information-theoretic formulation for this problem that reveals a novel interactive coding problem, where actions of the remote source depend on previous actions of the transmitter and vice versa. The third part clarifies how wireless devices powered by these new mechanisms can be made to coexist and cooperate forming large scalable wireless networks.