Stability Analysis of Slotted Aloha with Opportunistic RF Energy Harvesting

Energy harvesting (EH) is a promising technology for realizing energy-efficient wireless networks. In this paper, we utilize the ambient RF energy, particularly interference from neighboring transmissions, to replenish the batteries of the EH enabled nodes. However, RF energy harvesting imposes new challenges into the analysis of wireless networks. Our objective in this paper is to investigate the performance of a slotted Aloha random access wireless network consisting of two types of nodes, namely Type I, which has unlimited energy supply and Type II, which is solely powered by an RF energy harvesting circuit. The transmissions of a Type I node are recycled by a Type II node to replenish its battery. We characterize an inner bound on the stable throughput region under half-duplex and full-duplex energy harvesting paradigms as well as for the finite capacity battery case. Additionally, we analyze the case where RF energy harvesting serves as a backup for an unlimited energy source. We present numerical results that validate our analytical results, and demonstrate their utility for the analysis of the exact system. © 2016 IEEE.