Analysis and design of energy harvesting wireless communication systems

Wireless-powered communication is an emerging technology for powering the large number of miniature devices of the future. In a wireless-powered communication system, low-power sensors extract energy from the incident wireless signals to power their operations such as information transmission, sensing or reception. Due to sporadic energy availability, however, such a system is fundamentally different from a traditionally-powered communication system. This dissertation investigates three distinct aspects of wireless-powered communications to get insights on the system operation. First, leveraging concepts from finite-length information theory, an analytical framework is developed for examining wireless-powered communications with short packets, i.e., in the finite blocklength regime. This is relevant as remotely-powered communications may entail short packets due to small payloads, low-latency requirements, or limited energy to support a longer transmission. Second, using a stochastic geometry framework, an analytical model is developed for characterizing the performance of wireless-powered communications in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band. The proposed model incorporates the key features of mmWave systems such as directional beamforming and sensitivity to building blockages. Finally, the power transfer efficiency and the energy efficiency of a wireless-powered communication system aided by massive MIMO is characterized. The broad goal of this dissertation is to better understand wireless-powered communications in the context of the emerging technologies for 5G.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Wireless-Powered Communication Assisted by Two-Way Relay with Interference Alignment Underlaying Cognitive Radio Network

This study investigates the outage performance of an under-laying wireless-powered secondary system that reuses the primary users (PU) spectrum in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) network. Each secondary user (SU) harvests energy and receives information simultaneously by applying power splitting (PS) protocol. The communication between SUs is aided by a two-way (TW) decode and forward (DF) relay. We formulate a problem to design the PS ratios at SUs, the power control factor at the secondary relay, and beamforming matrices at all nodes to minimize the secondary network's outage probability. To address this problem, we propose a two-step solution. The first step establishes closedform expressions for the PS ratios at each SU and secondary relay's power control factor. Furthermore, in the second step, interference alignment (IA) is used to design proper precoding and decoding matrices for managing the interference between secondary and primary networks. We choose IA matrices based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) iterative algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate a significant decrease in the outage probability for the proposed scheme compared to the benchmark schemes, with an average reduction of more than two orders of magnitude achieved

Power Minimization Resource Allocation for Underlay MISO-NOMA SWIPT Systems

The combination of cognitive radio and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has tremendous potential to achieve high spectral efficiency in the IoT era. In this paper, we focus on the energy-efficient resource allocation of a cognitive multiple-input single-output NOMA system with the aid of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer. Specifically, a non-linear energy harvesting (EH) model is adopted to characterize the non-linear energy conversion property. In order to achieve the green design goal, we aim for the minimization of the system power consumption by jointly designing the transmit beamformer and the receive power splitter subject to the information transmission and EH harvesting requirements of second users (SUs), and the maximum tolerable interference constraints at primary users. However, the formulated optimization problem is non-convex and hard to tackle. By exploiting the classic semi-definite relaxation and successive convex approximation, we propose a penalty function-based algorithm to solve the non-convex problem. The convergence of the proposed algorithm is further proved. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the non-linear EH model is able to strongly reflect the property of practical energy harvester and the performance gain of the proposed algorithm than the baseline scheme

Robust AN-Aided Beamforming Design for Secure MISO Cognitive Radio Based on a Practical Nonlinear EH Model

Energy harvesting techniques are promising in next generation wireless communication systems. However, most of the existing works are based on an ideal linear energy harvesting model. In this paper, a multiple-input single-output cognitive radio network is studies under a practical non-linear energy harvesting model. In order to improve the security of both the primary network and the secondary network, a cooperative jamming scheme is proposed. A robust artificial noise aided beamforming design problem is formulated under the bounded channel state information error model. The formulated problem is non-convex and challenging to be solved. Using S-procedure and the semidefinite relaxation method, a suboptimal beamforming can be obtained. Simulation results show that the performance achieved under the non-linear energy harvesting model may be better than that obtained under the linear energy harvesting model. It is also shown that the cooperation betwen the primary network and the secondary network can obtain a performance gain compared with that without this cooperation

Performance analysis of power-splitting relaying protocol in SWIPT based cooperative NOMA systems

This paper investigates a relay assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) for downlink in cellular systems. Cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (C-NOMA) is employed along with power splitting protocol to enable both energy harvesting (EH) and information processing (IP). A downlink model consists of a base station (BS) and two users is considered, in which the near user (NU) is selected as a relay to forward the received signal from the BS to the far user (FU). Maximum ratio combining is then employed at the FU to combine both the signals received from the BS and NU. Closed form expressions of outage probability, throughput, ergodic rate and energy efficiency (EE) are firstly derived for the SWIPT based C-NOMA considering both scenarios of with and without direct link between the BS and FU. The impacts of EH time, EH efficiency, power-splitting ratio, source data rate and distance between different nodes on the performance are then investigated. The simulation results show that the C-NOMA with direct link achieves an outperformed performance over C-NOMA without direct link. Moreover, the performance of C-NOMA with direct link is also higher than that for OMA. Specifically, (1) the outage probability for C-NOMA in both direct and relaying link cases is always lower than that for OMA. (2) the outage probability, throughput and ergodic rate vary according to β, (3) the EE of both users can obtain in SNR range of from -10 to 5 dB and it decreases linearly as SNR increases. Numerical results are provided to verify the findings

Performance Analysis and Beamforming Design of a Secure Cooperative MISO-NOMA Network.

This paper studies the cell-edge user's performance of a secure multiple-input single-output non-orthogonal multiple-access (MISO-NOMA) system under the Rayleigh fading channel in the presence of an eavesdropper. We suppose a worst-case scenario that an eavesdropper has ideal user detection ability. In particular, we suggest an optimization-based beamforming scheme with MISO-NOMA to improve the security and outage probability of a cell-edge user while maintaining the quality of service of the near-user and degrading the performance of the eavesdropper. To this end, power allocation coefficients are adjusted with the help of target data rates of both the users by utilizing a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer with time switching/power splitting protocol, where the near-user is used to forward the information to cell-edge user. The analytical results demonstrate that our beamformer analysis can achieve reduced outage probability of cell-edge user in the presence of the eavesdropper. Moreover, the provided simulation results validate our theoretical analysis and show that our approach improves the overall performance of a two-user cooperative MISO-NOMA system