Simultaneous Information and Power Transfer with Transmitters with Hardware Impairments

We investigate the performance of a communication system with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer capabilities under non-ideal transmitter hardware. We adopt an experimentally validated additive noise model in which the level of the noise at an antenna is proportional to the signal power at that antenna. We consider the linear precoder design problem and focus on the problem of minimizing the mean-square error under energy harvesting constraints. This set-up, in general, constitutes a non-convex formulation. For the single antenna information user case, we provide a tight convex relaxation, i.e. a convex formulation from which an optimal solution for the original problem can be constructed. For the general case, we propose a block coordinate descent technique to solve the resulting non-convex problem. Our numerical results illustrate the effect of hardware impairments on the system