Active STAR-RIS-Aided Wireless Powered Communication Networks

In this paper, we investigate a wireless powered communication network (WPCN) in which a multi-antenna hybrid access point (HAP) communicates with multiple Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, assisted by an active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (aSTAR-RIS). In the energy transfer (ET) phase, the IoT devices harvest energy from the HAP with a nonlinear energy harvesting (EH) model, and subsequently transmit information signals to the HAP during the information transmission (IT) phase. To explore its full potential, the aSTAR-RIS employs energy splitting (ES), mode switching (MS), and time switching (TS) protocols. A sum rate maximization problem is formulated for each protocol, which jointly optimize the beamforming at the HAP, allocation of time slots and transmitting power for the IoT devices, and the adaptation of the aSTAR-RIS coefficients. To address the optimization problem with multiple coupled variables and complex non-convex constraints, we firstly decompose it into several subproblems. Specifically, to optimize the coefficients of the aSTAR-RIS in the IT phase, we develop a fractional programming-based successive convex approximation algorithm to handle the fractional objective function and the minimum rate constraints. Moreover, to obtain the coefficients of the aSTAR-RIS during the ET phase, we design a penalty-based SCA algorithm to address the binary constraints in the MS protocol and the rank-one constraints. Numerical results demonstrate that 1) employing the aSTAR-RIS in WPCNs can realize the extraordinary sum rate gain in comparison with the benchmarks of the active RIS and the passive STAR-RIS; 2) among the three operation protocols, the ES demonstrates the best performance, with the MS following closely behind, while the TS is the least effective; 3) as the minimum required data rate for each IoT device decreases, the performance gap among the three protocols becomes narrower.