Transmission Design for Active RIS-Aided Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a revolutionary technology to enhance both the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of wireless communication systems. However, most of the existing contributions mainly focused on the study of passive RIS, which suffers from the “double fading” effect. On the other hand, active RIS, which is equipped with amplifiers, can effectively address this issue. In this letter, we propose an active RIS-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system. Specifically, we maximize the weighted sum rate of the information receivers, subject to the minimum power received at all energy receivers, amplification power constraint at the active RIS, and the maximum transmit power constraint at the base station (BS). By adopting alternating optimization framework, suboptimal solutions are obtained. Simulation results show that the active RIS-aided SWIPT system has higher performance gain with the same power budget.