Charge-Then-Forward: Wireless-Powered Communication for Multiuser Relay Networks

This paper studies a relay-assisted wireless-powered communication network consisting of multiple source-destination pairs and a hybrid relay node (HRN). We consider a “charge-then-forward” protocol at the HRN, in which the HRN with constant energy supply first acts as an energy transmitter to charge the sources, and then forwards the information from the sources to their destinations through time division multiple access (TDMA) or frequency division multiple access (FDMA). Processing costs at the wireless-powered sources are taken into account. Our goal is to maximize the sum rate of all transmission pairs by jointly optimizing the time, frequency, and power resources. The formulated optimization problems for both TDMA and FDMA are non-convex. For the TDMA scheme, by appropriate transformation, the problem is reformulated as a convex problem and be optimally solved. For the FDMA case, we find the asymptotically optimal solution in the dual domain. Furthermore, suboptimal algorithms are proposed for both schemes to tradeoff the complexity and performance. Finally, the simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.