A stackelberg game-based energy trading scheme for power beacon-assisted wireless-powered communication

This paper studies a power beacon-assisted wireless-powered communication network, consisting of one hybrid access point (AP), one information source, and multiple power beacons (PBs). The source has no embedded power supply, and thus, has to harvest RF energy from the AP in the downlink before transmitting its information to the AP in the uplink. The PBs are deployed to help the AP charge the source in the downlink. However, in practice, the AP and PBs may belong to different operators. Thus, incentives are needed for the PBs to assist the AP during DL energy transfer phase, which is referred to as “energy trading”. We formulate this energy trading process as a Stackelberg game, in which the AP is a leader and the PBs are the followers. We then derive the Stackelberg equilibrium of the formulated game. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can achieve better performance as either the number of the PBs or the value of the gain per unit throughput increase, and as the distance between source and PBs decreases.