Towards Optimal Energy Harvesting Receiver Design in MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid analog/digital beamforming design for MIMO systems that optimizes simultaneous information detection and energy harvesting, offering improved performance over classical methods especially in interference-rich environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid beamforming approach that independently optimizes eigen-modes for energy harvesting and information detection in MIMO receivers.

Findings

Enhanced eigen-mode selection flexibility.

Improved energy harvesting and information detection performance.

Performance gains over classical receiver structures.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with simultaneous information detection (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) receiver. This point-to-point system operates in the vicinity of active interfering nodes. The receiver performs power splitting where a portion of received signal undergoes analog energy harvesting circuitry. Further, the information content of the other portion is extracted after performing digital beamforming. In this MIMO system, information carrier eigen-modes are not necessarily the eigen-modes with the strongest energy level. Hence, it is beneficial to perform independent beamforming at the receiver of MIMO-P2P channel. Here, we utilize a hybrid analog/digital beamforming for the purpose of simultaneous ID and EH in such scenarios. This design, provides extra design degrees-of-freedom in eigen-mode selection for ID and EH purposes independently. Worst-case performance of this receiver structure is discussed. Finally, its benefits is compared to the classical receiver structure and the gains are highlighted.