Multi-Objective Resource Allocation for IRS-Aided SWIPT

In this letter, we study the resource allocation for a multiuser intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system. Specifically, a multi-antenna base station (BS) transmits energy and information signals simultaneously to multiple energy harvesting receivers (EHRs) and information decoding receivers (IDRs) assisted by an IRS. Under this setup, we introduce a multi-objective optimization (MOOP) framework to investigate the fundamental trade-off between the data sum-rate maximization and the total harvested energy maximization, by jointly optimizing the energy/information beamforming vectors at the BS and the phase shifts at the IRS. This MOOP problem is first converted to a single-objective optimization problem (SOOP) via the ε-constraint method and then solved by majorization minimization (MM) and inner approximation (IA) techniques. Simulation results unveil a non-trivial trade-off between the considered competing objectives, as well as the superior performance of the proposed scheme as compared to various baseline schemes.