EH from V2X Communications: the Price of Uncertainty and the Impact of Platooning

In this paper, we explore how radio frequency energy from vehicular communications can be exploited by an energy harvesting device (EHD) placed alongside the road to deliver data packets through wireless connection to a remote Access Point. Based on updated local topology knowledge, we propose a cycle-based strategy to balance harvest and transmit phases at the EHD, in order to maximize the average throughput. A theoretical derivation is carried out to determine the optimal strategy parameters setting, and used to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over different scenarios, taking into account the road traffic intensity, the EHD battery capacity, the transmit power and the data rate. Results show that regular traffic patterns, as those created by vehicles platooning, can increase the obtained throughput by more than 30% with respect to irregular ones with the same average intensity. Black out probability is also derived for the former scenario. The resulting tradeoff between higher average throughput and lower black out probability shows that the proposed approach can be adopted for different applications by properly tuning the strategy parameters.