Wireless Information and Energy Transfer in Multi-Antenna Interference Channel

This paper considers the transmitter design for wireless information and energy transfer (WIET) in a multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel (IFC). The design problem is to maximize the system throughput subject to individual energy harvesting constraints and power constraints. It is observed that the ideal scheme, where the receivers simultaneously perform information detection (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) from the received signal, may not always achieve the best tradeoff between information transfer and energy harvesting, but simple practical schemes based on time splitting may perform better. We therefore propose two practical time splitting schemes, namely the time-division mode switching (TDMS) and time-division multiple access (TDMA), in addition to the existing power splitting (PS) scheme. In the two-user scenario, we show that beamforming is optimal to all the schemes. Moreover, the design problems associated with the TDMS and TDMA schemes admit semi-analytical solutions. In the general K-user scenario, a successive convex approximation method is proposed to handle the WIET problems associated with the ideal scheme, the PS scheme and the TDMA scheme, which are known NP-hard in general. Simulation results show that none of the schemes under consideration can always dominate another in terms of the sum rate performance. Specifically, it is observed that stronger cross-link channel power improves the achievable sum rate of time splitting schemes but degrades the sum rate performance of the ideal scheme and PS scheme. As a result, time splitting schemes can outperform the ideal scheme and the PS scheme in interference dominated scenarios.