Information and Energy Flows in Graphical Networks with Energy Transfer and Reuse

The conventional analysis of communication over graphical networks assumes that the energy received by a node on its incoming links cannot be reused by the latter for transmission on its outgoing links. Motivated by the emerging applications of wireless energy transfer to communication networks, a framework is studied in which the received energy can be (partially) reused. The framework leads to optimization problems over both standard information flow variables and energy flow variables that generalize the conventional formulation in terms of information flow variables only. Both unicast and multicast models are studied, and numerical results are presented that bring insight into the roles of the energy flow variables and of network coding in the presence of energy reuse.