Joint Information and Energy Transfer of SWIPT-Enabled Mobile Users in Wireless Networks

Extremely high reliability and energy efficiency are crucial in sixth generation (6G) mobile networks to accommodate the diverse range of end-user devices in the era of the Internet of Everything. The concept of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has been emerged as a promising solution to boost the reliability of wireless communication systems through prolonging the battery lifetime by harvesting energy from the received radio-frequency signals. In this paper, we propose a low complexity threshold-based pair switching (TbPS) technique for SWIPT in the context of large-scale cellular networks, where the multiple-antenna mobile users (MUs) employ maximum ratio combining technique and adopt the random waypoint model. Under the TbPS technique, a subset of MU’s antennas is allocated for information decoding (ID), only when their post-combiner signal-to-interference ratio, exceeds a certain threshold, while the remaining antennas are allocated for energy harvesting (EH). Contrary to traditional approaches which assume the existence of either uncorrelated or fully correlated interference, our proposed technique takes into consideration the interference correlation between nearby antennas. In order to further alleviate the inter-cell interference and energy consumption, we propose a traffic load-based sleeping (TLbS) technique in the context of finite-area network deployments, where lightly-loaded cells switch into sleep mode. By leveraging tools from stochastic geometry, we derive analytical expressions for the ID, EH as well as joint ID and EH success probability of MUs based on the proposed techniques. Our results demonstrate the optimal parameters (i.e., antenna selection and traffic load threshold) of our proposed techniques, that maximize the joint ID and EH success probability. Finally, it is shown that, by properly selecting the threshold values, both the proposed TbPS scheme and TLbS mechanism outperform the conventional techniques in terms of the SWIPT capability of the MUs.