Age of Information-Based Wireless Powered Communication Networks With Selfish Charging Nodes

This paper investigates a multi-node wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where a hybrid access point (HAP) first charges an Internet of Thing (IoT) device wirelessly with the assistance of multiple selfish wireless nodes (WNs), and then the IoT device uses the harvested energy to transmit real-time status updates to the HAP. Two incentive schemes, i.e., the energy-incentive scheme and the price-incentive scheme, are designed to overcome the selfishness of the WNs and enhance the per-packet AoI performance. For the energy-incentive scheme, an AoI-energy utility function is defined and an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the AoI-energy utility value of the HAP-IoT device pair. By using equality constraint elimination and Lagrangian method, the problem is solved and some closed-form solutions are derived to obtain the optimal solution. For the price-incentive scheme, an AoI-price utility function is defined and a Stackelberg game is established to maximize the utility of the HAP-IoT device pair. By using function transformation and Lagrange method, some semi-closed-form solutions are derived to maximize their own profits of the HAP and WNs in a distributed way. Numerical results show that our proposed two incentive mechanisms are able to achieve higher network utility values than the benchmark scheme. The more the number of WNs, the lower the AoI of each status update packet and the higher utility value of the HAP. It also shows that by positioning WNs closer to the IoT device, the better per-packet AoI performance can be achieved by both incentive mechanisms. Additionally, for the energy-incentive mechanism, its achieved AoI gain and energy gain decrease with the increment of the distance between the HAP and the IoT device. But for the price-incentive mechanism, the opposite phenomenon is observed.