Interference-assisted energy harvesting short packet communications with hardware impairments

Radio frequency energy harvesting offers a promising solution to provide low power Internet of Things (IoT) devices with convenient and perpetual energy supply. In this work, we investigate the reliable performance of an energy-constrained transmitter communicating with a receiver over Nakagami-m channel, where the effects of transceiver hardware impairments and finite blocklength coding are jointly considered. Specifically, the communication link between the transmitter and receiver operates within the coverage of an existing wireless system, with radio frequency signal from the existing system serving as an energy signal for the transmitter while acting as an interference signal for the receiver. By utilizing the finite-blocklength information theory, we first derive average block error rate (BLER) and asymptotic average BLER in closed-form expressions, which enable us to quantify the extent of reliability loss. Then, we analyze effective throughput of the system, and determine the optimal blocklength that maximizes the effective throughput. Computer simulations are employed to validate the accuracy of our analytical findings, demonstrating the presence of an outage threshold solely due to hardware impairments. Furthermore, if transmission rate exceeds the outage threshold defined by the level of hardware impairments, reliable communication within the system under consideration cannot be achieved, regardless of the transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).