Age‐aware relay strategy with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in remote monitoring systems

Abstract

Remote monitoring systems has emerged to automate public services, where Internet of Things (IoT) devices are deployed to collect and relay streams of status updates to a remote control centre. The freshness of collected data is of critical importance to system performance, which can be quantified by the concept of age of information (AoI). To obtain timely perception of the monitored area, each sensor tends to sample status updates at the maximum frequency, which may lead to device drop‐outs due to limited battery capacity. Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is considered as a promising technology to prolong network lifetime. In this paper, a SWIPT‐enabled two‐hop relay network, where a relay node uses power splitting protocol to assist data transmissions from multiple source nodes to the destination is considered. The impact of power splitting coefficients, data arrival pattern and time‐varying channel conditions on the averaged age performance and expected lifetime of the system is theoretically analysed. Moreover, a lightweight relay strategy which selectively forward packets based on a reward function consisting of energy level at relay node and expected age reduction is developed. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy outperforms existing schemes in collecting status updates in a timely and energy‐efficient manner.