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Optimal Pricing and User Cooperation for Utility-Efficient Wireless Powered Communications

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Abstract

In this study, optimal pricing and user cooperation schemes are considered in a wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where multiple users harvest energy from a dedicated hybrid access point (HAP, as a power station in the downlink) and transmit their independent information to HAP (as an information receiving station in the uplink) by using the harvested energy. Due to the doubly near-far problem, best cooperation-user selection scheme where the dedicated helping user which is nearer to the H-AP and in general has better channel condition both for DL energy harvesting as well as UL information transmission from source user uses its harvested energy to help forward the source user’s information to H-AP is proposed. Moreover, in the WPCN, the energy is scarce, users have incentive to refuse to cooperate in order to conserve resource. We propose a pricing mechanism to incentivize the helping user to cooperate the uplink transmission. Two transmission protocols for source-user centric and helping-user centric with pricing mechanism are investigated. We formulate the pricing and resource allocation problem as optimization problem and propose efficient algorithms by jointly user-selection and resource allocation to maximize the energy efficient and price-performance ratio. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme with pricing can enhance the source user’s performance with lower cost. Moreover, the pricing mechanisms can incentivize the helping user to cooperate other users’ to decrease the system energy cost.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61461029 and 61561032) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province (20162BCB23010 and 20161BAB202043).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Engineering School, Nanchang University, Nanchang, 330031, China

    Chuanqi Zhu, Dingcheng Yang, Xue Shen & Lin Xiao

  2. Information Systems Research Centre, Macao SAR, China

    Laurie Cuthbert

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  1. Chuanqi Zhu
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  2. Dingcheng Yang
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  3. Xue Shen
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  4. Lin Xiao
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  5. Laurie Cuthbert
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Correspondence to Dingcheng Yang.

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Zhu, C., Yang, D., Shen, X. et al. Optimal Pricing and User Cooperation for Utility-Efficient Wireless Powered Communications. Wireless Pers Commun 96, 599–619 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4187-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4187-2

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