DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF SIMULTANEOUS WIRELESS INFORMATION AND POWER TRANSFER SYSTEMS

The recent trends in the domain of wireless communications indicate severe upcoming challenges, both in terms of infrastructure as well as design of novel techniques. On the other hand, the world population keeps witnessing or hearing about new generations of mobile/wireless technologies within every half to one decade. It is certain the wireless communication systems have enabled the exchange of information without any physical cable(s), however, the dependence of the mobile devices on the power cables still persist. Each passing year unveils several critical challenges related to the increasing capacity and performance needs, power optimization at complex hardware circuitries, mobility of the users, and demand for even better energy efficiency algorithms at the wireless devices. Moreover, an additional issue is raised in the form of continuous battery drainage at these limited-power devices for sufficing their assertive demands. In this regard, optimal performance at any device is heavily constrained by either wired, or an inductive based wireless recharging of the equipment on a continuous basis. This process is very inconvenient and such a problem is foreseen to persist in future, irrespective of the wireless communication method used. Recently, a promising idea for simultaneous wireless radio-frequency (RF) transmission of information and energy came into spotlight during the last decade. This technique does not only guarantee a more flexible recharging alternative, but also ensures its co-existence with any of the existing (RF-based) or alternatively proposed methods of wireless communications, such as visible light communications (VLC) (e.g., Light Fidelity (Li-Fi)), optical communications (e.g., LASER-equipped communication systems), and far-envisioned quantum-based communication systems. In addition, this scheme is expected to cater to the needs of many current and future technologies like wearable devices, sensors used in hazardous areas, 5G and beyond, etc. This Thesis presents a detailed investigation of several interesting scenarios in this direction, specifically concerning design and optimization of such RF-based power transfer systems. The first chapter of this Thesis provides a detailed overview of the considered topic, which serves as the foundation step. The details include the highlights about its main contributions, discussion about the adopted mathematical (optimization) tools, and further refined minutiae about its organization. Following this, a detailed survey on the wireless power transmission (WPT) techniques is provided, which includes the discussion about historical developments of WPT comprising its present forms, consideration of WPT with wireless communications, and its compatibility with the existing techniques. Moreover, a review on various types of RF energy harvesting (EH) modules is incorporated, along with a brief and general overview on the system modeling, the modeling assumptions, and recent industrial considerations. Furthermore, this Thesis work has been divided into three main research topics, as follows. Firstly, the notion of simultaneous wireless information and power transmission (SWIPT) is investigated in conjunction with the cooperative systems framework consisting of single source, multiple relays and multiple users. In this context, several interesting aspects like relay selection, multi-carrier, and resource allocation are considered, along with problem formulations dealing with either maximization of throughput, maximization of harvested energy, or both. Secondly, this Thesis builds up on the idea of transmit precoder design for wireless multigroup multicasting systems in conjunction with SWIPT. Herein, the advantages of adopting separate multicasting and energy precoder designs are illustrated, where we investigate the benefits of multiple antenna transmitters by exploiting the similarities between broadcasting information and wirelessly transferring power. The proposed design does not only facilitates the SWIPT mechanism, but may also serve as a potential candidate to complement the separate waveform designing mechanism with exclusive RF signals meant for information and power transmissions, respectively. Lastly, a novel mechanism is developed to establish a relationship between the SWIPT and cache-enabled cooperative systems. In this direction, benefits of adopting the SWIPT-caching framework are illustrated, with special emphasis on an enhanced rate-energy (R-E) trade-off in contrast to the traditional SWIPT systems. The common notion in the context of SWIPT revolves around the transmission of information, and storage of power. In this vein, the proposed work investigates the system wherein both information and power can be transmitted and stored. The Thesis finally concludes with insights on the future directions and open research challenges associated with the considered framework

Successive Convex Approximation for Transmit Power Minimization in SWIPT-Multicast Systems

We propose a novel technique for total transmit power minimization and optimal precoder design in wireless multi-group (MG) multicasting (MC) systems. The considered framework consists of three different systems capable of handling heterogeneous user types viz., information decoding (ID) specific users with conventional receiver architectures, energy harvesting (EH) only users with non-linear EH module, and users with joint ID and EH capabilities having separate units for the two operations, respectively. Each user is categorized under unique group(s), which can be of MC type specifically meant for ID users, and/or an energy group consisting of EH explicit users. The joint ID and EH users are a part of the (last) EH group as well as any one of the MC groups distinctly. In this regard, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power with optimal precoder designs for the three aforementioned scenarios, under constraints on minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and harvested energy by the users with respective demands. The problem may be adapted to the well-known semi-definite program, which can be typically solved via relaxation of rank-1 constraint. However, the relaxation of this constraint may in some cases lead to performance degradation, which increases with the rank of the solution obtained from the relaxed problem. Hence, we develop a novel technique motivated by the feasible-point pursuit and successive convex approximation method in order to address the rank-related issue. The benefits of the proposed method are illustrated under various operating conditions and parameter values, with comparison between the three above-mentioned scenarios

Multigroup Multicast Precoding for Energy Optimization in SWIPT Systems with Heterogeneous Users

The key to developing future generations of wireless communication systems lies in the expansion of extant methodologies, which ensures the coexistence of a variety of devices within a system. In this paper, we assume several multicasting (MC) groups comprising three types of heterogeneous users including Information Decoding (ID), Energy Harvesting (EH) and both ID and EH. We present a novel framework to investigate the multi-group (MG) - MC precoder designs for three different scenarios, namely, Separate Multicast and Energy Precoding Design (SMEP), Joint Multicast and Energy Precoding Design (JMEP), and Per-User Information and/or Energy Precoding Design (PIEP). In the considered system, a multi-antenna source transmits the relevant information and/or energy to the groups of corresponding receivers using more than one MC streams. The data processing users employ the conventional ID receiver architectures, the EH users make use of a non-linear EH module for energy acquisition, while the users capable of performing both ID and EH utilize the separated architecture with disparate ID and non-linear EH units. Our contribution is threefold. Firstly, we propose an optimization framework to i) minimize the total transmit power and ii) to maximize the sum harvested energy, the two key performance metrics of MG-MC systems. The proposed framework allows the analysis of the system under arbitrary given quality of service and harvested energy requirements. Secondly, to deal with the non-convexity of the formulated problems, we transform the original problems respectively into equivalent forms, which can be effectively solved by semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and alternating optimization. The convergence of the proposed algorithms is analytically guaranteed. Thirdly, a comparative study between the proposed schemes is conducted via extensive numerical results, wherein the benefits of adopting SMEP over JMEP and PIEP models are discusse

Boosting SWIPT via Symbol-Level Precoding

In this paper, we investigate a simultaneous wireless information and power transmission (SWIPT) system, wherein a single multi-antenna transmitter serves multiple single-antenna users which employ the power-splitting (PS) receiver architecture. We formulate a Symbol-Level Precoding (SLP) based transmit power minimization problem dependent on the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and energy harvesting (EH) thresholds. We solve the corresponding non-negative convex quadratic optimization problem per time frame of transmitted symbols and study the benefits of proposed design under Zero-Forcing (ZF) Precoding, Direct Demand SLP (DD-SLP), and Squared-Root Demand SLP (RD-SLP) techniques. A static PS-ratio is fixed according to the SINR and EH demands to enable the segregation of intended received signals for information decoding (ID) and EH, respectively. Numerical results show the property conservation of SINR-enhancement via SLP at the ID unit while increasing the harvested energy at each of the end-users

A Tutorial on Interference Exploitation via Symbol-Level Precoding: Overview, State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

IEEE Interference is traditionally viewed as a performance limiting factor in wireless communication systems, which is to be minimized or mitigated. Nevertheless, a recent line of work has shown that by manipulating the interfering signals such that they add up constructively at the receiver side, known interference can be made beneficial and further improve the system performance in a variety of wireless scenarios, achieved by symbol-level precoding (SLP). This paper aims to provide a tutorial on interference exploitation techniques from the perspective of precoding design in a multi-antenna wireless communication system, by beginning with the classification of constructive interference (CI) and destructive interference (DI). The definition for CI is presented and the corresponding mathematical characterization is formulated for popular modulation types, based on which optimization-based precoding techniques are discussed. In addition, the extension of CI precoding to other application scenarios as well as for hardware efficiency is also described. Proof-of-concept testbeds are demonstrated for the potential practical implementation of CI precoding, and finally a list of open problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire and motivate further research directions in this area

Interference Exploitation via Symbol-Level Precoding: Overview, State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Interference is traditionally viewed as a performance limiting factor in wireless communication systems, which is to be minimized or mitigated. Nevertheless, a recent line of work has shown that by manipulating the interfering signals such that they add up constructively at the receiver side, known interference can be made beneficial and further improve the system performance in a variety of wireless scenarios, achieved by symbol-level precoding (SLP). This paper aims to provide a tutorial on interference exploitation techniques from the perspective of precoding design in a multi-antenna wireless communication system, by beginning with the classification of constructive interference (CI) and destructive interference (DI). The definition for CI is presented and the corresponding mathematical characterization is formulated for popular modulation types, based on which optimization-based precoding techniques are discussed. In addition, the extension of CI precoding to other application scenarios as well as for hardware efficiency is also described. Proof-of-concept testbeds are demonstrated for the potential practical implementation of CI precoding, and finally a list of open problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire and motivate further research directions in this area

Symbol-level and Multicast Precoding for Multiuser Multiantenna Downlink: A State-of-the-art, Classification and Challenges

Precoding has been conventionally considered as an effective means of mitigating or exploiting the interference in the multiantenna downlink channel, where multiple users are simultaneously served with independent information over the same channel resources. The early works in this area were focused on transmitting an individual information stream to each user by constructing weighted linear combinations of symbol blocks (codewords). However, more recent works have moved beyond this traditional view by: i) transmitting distinct data streams to groups of users and ii) applying precoding on a symbol-per-symbol basis. In this context, the current survey presents a unified view and classification of precoding techniques with respect to two main axes: i) the switching rate of the precoding weights, leading to the classes of block-level and symbol-level precoding, ii) the number of users that each stream is addressed to, hence unicast, multicast, and broadcast precoding. Furthermore, the classified techniques are compared through representative numerical results to demonstrate their relative performance and uncover fundamental insights. Finally, a list of open theoretical problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire further research in this area

Optimizing Resource Allocation with Energy Efficiency and Backhaul Challenges

To meet the requirements of future wireless mobile communication which aims to increase the data rates, coverage and reliability while reducing energy consumption and latency, and also deal with the explosive mobile traffic growth which imposes high demands on backhaul for massive content delivery, developing green communication and reducing the backhaul requirements have become two significant trends. One of the promising techniques to provide green communication is wireless power transfer (WPT) which facilitates energy-efficient architectures, e.g. simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). Edge caching, on the other side, brings content closer to the users by storing popular content in caches installed at the network edge to reduce peak-time traffic, backhaul cost and latency. In this thesis, we focus on the resource allocation technology for emerging network architectures, i.e. the SWIPT-enabled multiple-antenna systems and cache-enabled cellular systems, to tackle the challenges of limited resources such as insufficient energy supply and backhaul capacity. We start with the joint design of beamforming and power transfer ratios for SWIPT in MISO broadcast channels and MIMO relay systems, respectively, aiming for maximizing the energy efficiency subject to both the Quality of Service (QoS) constraints and energy harvesting constraints. Then move to the content placement optimization for cache-enabled heterogeneous small cell networks so as to minimize the backhaul requirements. In particular, we enable multicast content delivery and cooperative content sharing utilizing maximum distance separable (MDS) codes to provide further caching gains. Both analysis and simulation results are provided throughout the thesis to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed algorithms over the state-of-the-art methods

Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided MIMO Broadcasting for Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is invoked for enhancing the energy harvesting performance of a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) aided system. Specifically, an IRS-assisted SWIPT system is considered, where a multi-antenna aided base station (BS) communicates with several multi-antenna assisted information receivers (IRs), while guaranteeing the energy harvesting requirement of the energy receivers (ERs). To maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) of IRs, the transmit precoding (TPC) matrices of the BS and passive phase shift matrix of the IRS should be jointly optimized. To tackle this challenging optimization problem, we first adopt the classic block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm for decoupling the original optimization problem into several subproblems and alternatively optimize the TPC matrices and the phase shift matrix. For each subproblem, we provide a low-complexity iterative algorithm, which is guaranteed to converge to the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point of each subproblem. The BCD algorithm is rigorously proved to converge to the KKT point of the original problem. We also conceive a feasibility checking method to study its feasibility. Our extensive simulation results confirm that employing IRSs in SWIPT beneficially enhances the system performance and the proposed BCD algorithm converges rapidly, which is appealing for practical applications