Energy Efficient Beamforming in MISO Heterogeneous Cellular Networks With Wireless Information and Power Transfer

The advent of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) offers a promising approach to providing cost-effective and perpetual power supplies for energy-constrained mobile devices in heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs). As energy efficiency (EE) has been envisioned as a key performance metric in 5G wireless networks, we consider a multiple-input single-output (MISO) femtocell cochannel overlaid with a Macrocell to exploit the advantages of SWIPT while promoting the EE. The femto base station sends information to information decoding (ID) femto users (FUs) and transfers energy to energy harvesting (EH) FUs simultaneously, and also suppresses its interference to Macro users. We maximize the information transmission efficiency (ITE) of ID FUs and energy harvesting efficiency (EHE) of EH FUs, respectively, with the QoS of all users, and investigate their relationship. We formulate these problems as fractional programming, which are nontrivial to solve due to the nonconvexity of ITE and EHE. To tackle these problems, we devise two beamformers namely zero-forcing (ZF) and mixed beamforming (MBF), and then propose an efficient algorithm to obtain the optimal power under both beamformers. Simulation results demonstrate that MBF provides better ITE and EHE than ZF, and there exists a tradeoff between ITE and EHE in general.