Age of information analysis for internet of things information status update system with cellular backhaul and dedicated energy harvesting beacons

The Internet of Things (IoT) that is usually deployed with the assistance of cellular backhaul and energy harvesting (EH) is characterized by the status update freshness. However, the traditional nature EH results in the loss of information freshness due to the randomness of nature energy process. Although using wireless energy transferring (WET) to charge sensors can overcome this problem, this method has low-energy efficiency. With these considerations, this paper proposes a novel IoT system under cellular communication scenario by simultaneously exploiting the nature EH and WET. The proposed IoT system is consisted of a cellular backhaul subsystem, a wireless EH and transferring (WEHT) subsystem, and a wireless sensor status update subsystem. The WEHT subsystem employs the dedicated power beacons harvesting energy from natural energy source and transferring the harvested energy to sensor. For the proposed IoT system, this paper first investigates the WEHT subsystem and constructs the Markov Chain (MC) of discrete energy states as well as the MC state transition matrix. Second, the average AoI and peak AoI (PAoI) are formulated by separately considering cellular backhaul and EHTBs. The AoI (PAoI) comparison shows that the proposed EHTB-based IoT system can outperform the conventional non-EHTB one where the sensor directly harvests energy from natural source. At the same time, the numerical results exploit the impact of system parameters on AoI and PAoI, respectively. It is found that there exists a trade-off between the nature energy arrival and EHTB energy transfer so that the average minimum AoI and PAoI are achieved.