A hybrid MAC protocol for optimal channel allocation in large-scale wireless powered communication networks

Abstract This paper proposes a large-scale wireless powered communication network (WPCN), which consists of a hybrid access point (H-AP) and numerous nodes. The H-AP broadcasts energy to all nodes, and the nodes harvest the energy and then use the harvested energy to transmit information. For the large-scale WPCN, we also propose a novel hybrid multiple access protocol, termed hybrid multiple access-based dual harvest-then-transmit. The proposed protocol utilizes both time division multiple access (TDMA) and carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA), in order to deal with various traffic patterns and transmission reliability of different applications in large-scale networks. We consider a dual wireless energy transfer (WET) at the H-AP. The main WET is performed in TDMA and the other WET is performed at space holes in CSMA, to increase the channel utilization and harvested energy. For the considerations, we study the sum-throughput maximization in the large-scale WPCN based on hybrid multiple access-based dual harvest-then-transmit. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional protocol in large-scale WPCN