A Novel Energy Conservation Scheme for IoT Based Wireless Networks: A Use Case of E-Commerce Systems for Consumer Electronics

The emerging consumer electronic products and sensor devices are involved in data driven consumer applications. E-commerce is an important service application based on sensor web technology. It involves networks of intelligent objects or sensor nodes for data collection and data sharing for e-commerce systems. But these massive devices involved in the huge data collection are battery limited. This puts huge energy burden on the internet-of-things (IoT) based wireless network. Thus, energy sustainability is very important in energy constrained IoT networks for next generation sustainable IoT support. This paper presents a wireless powered IoT network aided by self-sustainable intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). The energy is harvested by the user nodes as well as the IRSs by tuning the IRS reflection coefficients. An algorithm is proposed which associates a set of IoT nodes to each IRS such that the energy requirements and sum rate of the network are met. It is observed that the IRS-aided system with energy harvesting capabilities achieve maximum average sum rate of 20 bits/s/Hz with the proposed algorithm at base station (BS) transmit power Pt of 40 dBm. Further, the impact of energy harvesting on the tradeoff between required power and achieved sum rate is evaluated. The IRS-aided wireless powered system is compared with system model with no IRS and no energy harvesting case for performance evaluation. In the end, the use-case scenarios of energy efficient wireless network in e-commerce consumer electronic systems are also discussed.