Energy enhancement and efficient route selection mechanism using H-SWIPT for multi-hop IoT networks

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is recently emerging as one of the vital solutions to prolong the lifetime of energy constrained wireless sensor nodes. However, current works on SWIPT considered only the immediate past-hop node's RF signal as a source of energy harvesting in multi-hop Internet of things (IoT) networks. In case of weak radio frequency (RF) signal, the amount of harvested energy does not support for continuous communication. Hence, in this paper a new energy harvesting mechanism is proposed which considers multiple sources (MS) such as (1) sink broadcasting energy, (2) co-channel interference, (3) neighbor nodes' RF signal, and (4) immediate past-hop node's RF signal for energy harvesting. Towards such prospect, a new SWIPT architecture is proposed called hybrid SWIPT (H-SWIPT) by integrating time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) architectures. Furthermore, an efficient route selection mechanism is introduced to minimize the total energy consumption of the path based on an energy cost metric. To validate the proposed mechanism, simulation experiments are conducted and obtained the superiority of H-SWIPT compared with existing methods in terms of average harvested energy. Further, the effectiveness of proposed method performance is investigated through energy cost at different node density and barrier rates.