Interest-aware energy collection & resource management in machine to machine communications

The emerging paradigm of Machine to Machine (M2M)-driven Internet of Things (IoT), where physical objects are not disconnected from the virtual world but aim at collectively provide contextual services, calls for enhanced and more energy-efficient resource management approaches. In this paper, the problem is addressed through a joint interest, physical and energy-aware clustering and resource management framework, capitalizing on the wireless powered communication (WPC) technique. Within the proposed framework the numerous M2M devices initially form different clusters based on the low complexity Chinese Restaurant Process (CRP), properly adapted to account for interest, physical and energy related factors. Following that, a cluster-head is selected among the members of each cluster. The proposed approach enables the devices of a cluster with the support of the cluster-head to harvest and store energy in a stable manner through Radio Frequency (RF) signals adopting the WPC paradigm, thus prolonging the operation of the overall M2M network. Each M2M device is associated with a generic utility function, which appropriately represents its degree of satisfaction in relation to the consumed transmission power. Based on the distributed nature of the M2M network, a maximization problem of each device's utility function is formulated as a non-cooperative game and its unique Nash equilibrium point is determined, in terms of devices' optimal transmission powers. Considering the devices' equilibrium transmission powers, the optimal charging transmission powers of the cluster-heads are derived. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated via modeling and simulation and under various topologies and scenarios, and its operational efficiency and effectiveness is demonstrated.