Performance Analysis of Ambient RF Energy Harvesting with Repulsive Point Process Modeling

Ambient radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting technique has recently been proposed as a potential solution for providing proactive energy replenishment for wireless devices. This paper aims to analyze the performance of a battery-free wireless sensor powered by ambient RF energy harvesting using a stochastic geometry approach. Specifically, we consider the point-to-point uplink transmission of a wireless sensor in a stochastic geometry network, where ambient RF sources, such as mobile transmit devices, access points and base stations, are distributed as a Ginibre α-determinantal point process (DPP). The DPP is able to capture repulsion among points, and hence, it is more general than the Poisson point process (PPP). We analyze two common receiver architectures: separated receiver and time-switching architectures. For each architecture, we consider the scenarios with and without co-channel interference for information transmission. We derive the expectation of the RF energy harvesting rate in closed form and also compute its variance. Moreover, we perform a worst-case study which derives the upper bound of both power and transmission outage probabilities. Additionally, we provide guidelines on the setting of optimal time-switching coefficient in the case of the time-switching architecture. Numerical results verify the correctness of the analysis and show various tradeoffs between parameter setting. Lastly, we prove that the RF-powered sensor performs better when the distribution of the ambient sources exhibits stronger repulsion.