On the Capacity of Wireless Powered Communication Systems Over Rician Fading Channels

In this paper, we consider a point-to-point multi-input multi-output wireless-powered communication system, where the source S is powered by a dedicated power beacon (PB) with multiple antennas. Employing the time splitting protocol, the energy constrained source S first harvests energy through the radio-frequency signals sent by the PB and then uses this energy to transmit information to the destination D. Unlike several prior works, we assume that the energy transfer link is subjected to Rician fading, which is a real fading environment, due to relatively short range power transfer distance and the existence of a strong line of sight path. We present a comprehensive analysis of the achievable ergodic capacity in two scenarios, depending on the availability of channel state information (CSI) at PB, namely, the absence of CSI and partial CSI. For the former case, equal power allocation is used, while for the later one, energy beamforming is used to enhance the energy transfer efficiency. For both the cases, closed-form expressions for the upper and lower bounds of the ergodic capacity are derived. Furthermore, the optimal time split is discussed, and the capacity in the low and high signal-to-noise ratio regimes is studied through simple closed-form expressions. Numerical results and simulations are provided to validate the theoretical analysis. The results show that the Rician factor K has a significant impact on the ergodic capacity performance, and this impact strongly depends on the availability of the CSI at the PB.