Joint Downlink/Uplink Design for Wireless Powered Networks With Interference

This paper jointly investigates the downlink/uplink of wireless powered networks (WPNs), which are exposed to the effect of the cascaded near-far problem, i.e., the asymmetric overall degradation of the users' performance, due to different path-loss values. More specifically, assuming that the users are able to harvest energy both from interference and desired signals, higher path loss reduces the downlink rate of the far user, while it also negatively affects its uplink rate, since less energy can be harvested during downlink. Furthermore, if the far user is located at the cell edge, its performance is more severely impaired by interference, despite the potential gain due to energy harvesting from interference signals. To this end, we fairly maximize the downlink/uplink users' rates, by utilizing corresponding priority weights. Two communication protocols are taken into account for the downlink, namely, time division multiple access and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), while NOMA with time sharing is considered for the uplink. The formulated multidimensional non-convex optimization problems are transformed into the equivalent convex ones and can be solved with low complexity. Simulations results illustrate that: 1) a relatively high downlink rate can be achieved, while the required energy is simultaneously harvested by the users for the uplink and 2) dowlink NOMA is a more appropriate option with respect to the network topology, especially when a high downlink rate is desired.