Joint scheduling of data transmission and wireless power transfer in multi-channel device-to-device networks

As the mobile traffic explodes, direct device-to-device communications attract much attention as one of next-generation technologies to increase the spatial spectrum efficiency in multichannel wireless networks. On the other hand, as battery-powered mobile devices interrupt user experience due to limited battery capacity, wireless power transfer has emerged as a convenient and perpetual power supply. However, current circuit technologies cannot support both energy harvesting and information decoding at the same time, and thus the time-division-multiple-access approach is often used for either data transmission or power transfer at a time, which requires joint scheduling of data transmissions and wireless power transfer. In this paper, we investigate the joint scheduling problem of multi-channel data transmissions and wireless power transfer, formulate the joint problem using a unified framework, and identify new difficulties in efficient resource allocation. We also develop a preliminary solution that achieves good empirical performance in single-hop D2D network scenarios.