Statistical Max-SINR Beamforming for Wireless Powered Communications in Airborne Massive MIMO System

This paper proposes an airborne massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system for wireless energy transfer (WET) and information transmission. An air platform (AP) equipped with two-dimension rectangular antenna array is employed to broadcast energy and provide wireless access for ground sensors. By exploiting the statistical property of air-terrestrial MIMO channels, the energy and information beamformers are jointly designed to maximize the average received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), which gives rise to a statistical max-SINR beamforming scheme. The scheme gets rid of the requirement on instantaneous channel state information (CSI), and thus results in significant saving in training resource and energy consumption. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve comparable performance with the schemes that requires instantaneous CSI.