MIMO Broadcasting for Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

TL;DR

This paper investigates MIMO broadcast systems enabling simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), deriving optimal strategies and practical designs for different receiver configurations to balance data rate and energy harvesting.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of MIMO SWIPT systems with separated and co-located receivers, including optimal transmission strategies and practical receiver designs.

Findings

Optimal transmission strategies for separated receivers maximizing rate-energy tradeoff.

Outer bounds on achievable rate-energy regions for co-located receivers.

Practical designs (time switching and power splitting) achieve regions close to theoretical limits.

Abstract

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising new solution to provide convenient and perpetual energy supplies to wireless networks. In practice, WPT is implementable by various technologies such as inductive coupling, magnetic resonate coupling, and electromagnetic (EM) radiation, for short-/mid-/long-range applications, respectively. In this paper, we consider the EM or radio signal enabled WPT in particular. Since radio signals can carry energy as well as information at the same time, a unified study on simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is pursued. Specifically, this paper studies a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless broadcast system consisting of three nodes, where one receiver harvests energy and another receiver decodes information separately from the signals sent by a common transmitter, and all the transmitter and receivers may be equipped with multiple antennas. Two scenarios are examined, in which the information receiver and energy receiver are separated and see different MIMO channels from the transmitter, or co-located and see the identical MIMO channel from the transmitter. For the case of separated receivers, we derive the optimal transmission strategy to achieve different tradeoffs for maximal information rate versus energy transfer, which are characterized by the boundary of a so-called rate-energy (R-E) region. For the case of co-located receivers, we show an outer bound for the achievable R-E region due to the potential limitation that practical energy harvesting receivers are not yet able to decode information directly. Under this constraint, we investigate two practical designs for the co-located receiver case, namely time switching and power splitting, and characterize their achievable R-E regions in comparison to the outer bound.