Rate-Energy Tradeoff in Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer Over Fading Channels With Uncertain Distribution

This paper investigates the tradeoff between information rate and harvested energy in a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer system under power splitting (PS) scheme and time switching (TS) scheme. A single-input-multiple-output transmitter–receiver pair is considered. For the channel from the transmitter to the receiver, only the mean and covariance matrix are known, but the instantaneous channel information or the channel gain distribution is unknown. We define robust outage capacity that applies for all possible channel distributions with the given mean and covariance matrix, and study the tradeoff between the robust outage capacity and harvested power level. By solving optimization problems, we find the PS ratio setting for PS scheme and TS ratio setting for TS scheme to achieve the outer boundary of robust outage capacity-energy region (which includes all possible pairs of achievable robust outage capacity and harvested power level). The PS and TS ratio setting are fixed over fading blocks, and thus can avoid communication overhead and computation overhead over each fading block, and facilitate a simple implementation in a practical system. We also prove that the robust outage capacity-energy regions in PS scheme and TS scheme are both convex. Further, we prove that the PS scheme outperforms the TS scheme in terms of the rate-energy tradeoff. Numerical results are also presented to verify the correctness of our theoretical results.