Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces for Sum-Rate Maximization in Cognitive Radio Enabled Wireless Powered Communication Network

In this paper, we study a cognitive radio (CR)-enabled wireless powered communication network (WPCN) with an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). A cognitive wireless powered communication network (CWPCN) consisting of one secondary wireless powered communication network, in which a hybrid access point broadcasts wireless energy to multiple users on downlink and receives information signals on uplink, shares the same spectrum with the existing primary wireless communication network. In this paper, we consider an underlay CWPCN in which the secondary network is regulated by a given interference temperature constraint (ITC) such that interference with the primary network is kept no greater than a predefined threshold. To enhance the performance of the CWPCN, we consider an IRS-assisted network in which multiple passive reflection elements are configured to reflect the signals in any desired phase/direction. Our main goal is to maximize the sum throughput of secondary users while managing the interference constraint. For this, we jointly optimize the uplink and downlink phase shift matrices of the IRS elements with optimal time slots for wireless energy transfer (WET) on downlink and wireless information transfer on uplink. In finding the optimal solution, the formulated optimization problem is non-convex, complex, and intractable. In this paper, we propose an alternating optimization (AO)-based solution with a successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. We show through simulation results that the proposed IRS-assisted network provides a significant enhancement in performance over the conventional CWPCN.