  Driven by the Internet of Things vision, recent years have seen the rise of
new horizons for the wireless ecosystem in which a very large number of mobile
low power devices interact to run sophisticated applications. The main
hindrance to the massive deployment of low power nodes is most probably the
prohibitive maintenance cost of battery replacement and the ecotoxicity of the
battery production/end-of-life. An emerging research direction to avoid battery
replacement is the combination of radio frequency energy harvesting and mobile
computing (MC). In this paper, we propose the use of simultaneous information
and power transfer (SWIPT) to control the distributed computation process while
delivering power to perform the computation tasks requested. A real-time MC
system is considered, meaning that the trade-off between the information rate
and the energy harvested must be carefully chosen to guarantee that the CPU may
perform tasks of given complexity before receiving a new control signal. In
order to provide a system-level perspective on the performance of SWIPT-MC
networks, we propose a mathematical framework based on stochastic geometry to
characterise the rate-energy trade-off of the system. The resulting achievable
performance region is then put in relation with the CPU energy consumption to
investigate the operating conditions of real-time computing systems. Finally,
numerical results illustrate the joint effect of the network densification and
the propagation environment on the optimisation of the CPU usage.
