Efficient Battery Usage in Wireless-Powered Cell-Free Systems With Self-Energy Recycling

This article investigates wireless-powered cell-free systems, in which the users send their uplink data signal while simultaneously harvesting energy from network nodes and user terminals – including the transmitting user terminal itself – by performing self-energy recycling. In this rather general setting, a closed-form lower bound of the amount of harvested energy and the achieved signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio expressions are derived. Then, to improve the energy efficiency, we formulate the problem of minimizing the users' battery energy usage while satisfying minimum data rate requirements. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, a novel alternating optimization algorithm is proposed, and its proof of convergence is provided. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed method is more efficient than a state-of-art algorithm in terms of battery energy usage and outage rate.