Mutual Information Maximization for SWIPT AF MIMO Relay Systems With Non-Linear EH Models and Imperfect Channel State Information

In this paper, we investigate a two-hop simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay communication system with an energy-limited relay node. The relay node harvests energy based on the radio-frequency (RF) signal transmitted from the source node through the time-switching (TS) protocol and fully uses the harvested energy to precode and forward the information to the destination node. The non-linear energy harvesting models are considered at the relay node. With the consideration of the channel estimation error, the joint optimization of the TS factor, source and relay precoding matrices is proposed with robustness against the channel state information (CSI) mismatch to maximize the mutual information (MI) between the source and destination nodes. The optimal structure for the source and relay precoding matrices is derived to simplify the transceiver optimization problem. Numerical simulations show that the system performance provided by the proposed algorithms with robustness is better than the non-robust algorithm.