Two-Way Dual-Hop WPCN With A Practical Energy Harvesting Model

In this paper, we study a dual-hop wireless powered communication network (DH-WPCN), where the two-way communication between the users and the access point (AP) is assisted by a relay. Assuming a piece-wise linear energy harvesting (EH) model for the users and the relay, we investigate the problem of total throughput maximization for both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying modes. To deal with the non-convexity of the throughput maximization problem, we apply the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique and alternately optimize different blocks of optimization variables until convergence is achieved. Numerical results demonstrate the substantial performance gain of the proposed scheme with piece-wise linear EH model as compared to the case with oversimplified linear EH model. This is due to the fact that our proposed scheme takes into consideration the saturation effect of practical EH circuits in optimizing the resource allocation.