A technical review of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT)

The emergence of Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) has opened new avenues to address the issue of energy shortage in wireless networks. The ability to transfer power and information across the network can not only help the edge devices to communicate efficiently but also prolong the lifetime of devices near the base station. In cooperative networks it can provide the much needed flexibility at relays to harvest the energy from a distant source. Aforementioned reasons are some of the key motivations to review the advances in SWIPT. Therefore, this paper provides a review of recent studies in SWIPT from a technical point of view. In particular we discuss the fundamentals of separated and integrated receiver architectures in SWIPT. We then provide the tradeoff between rate and energy in SWIPT by using data outage and energy shortage probabilities. This review also act as a corner stone to understand the significance of green communication in future 5G technologies.