By enabling wireless devices to be charged wirelessly and remotely, radiofrequency energy harvesting (RFEH) has become a promising technology to powerthe unattended Internet of Things (IoT) low-power devices. To enable this, infuture IoT networks, besides the conventional data access points (DAPs)responsible for collecting data from IoT devices, energy access points (EAPs)should be deployed to transfer radio frequency (RF) energy to IoT devices tomaintain their sustainable operations. In practice, the DAPs and EAPs may beoperated by different operators and a DAP should provide certain incentives tomotivate the surrounding EAPs to charge its associated IoT device(s) to assistits data collection. Motivated by this, in this paper we develop a contracttheory-based incentive mechanism for the energy trading in RFEH assisted IoTsystems. The necessary and sufficient condition for the feasibility of theformulated contract is analyzed. The optimal contract is derived to maximizethe DAP's expected utility as well as the social welfare. Simulation resultsdemonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed incentivemechanism.
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