Weighted Sum-SINR and Fairness Optimization for SWIPT-Multigroup Multicasting Systems With Heterogeneous Users

The development of next generation wireless communication systems focuses on the expansion of existing technologies, while ensuring an accord between various devices within a system. In this article, we target the aspect of precoder design for simultaneous wireless information and power transmission (SWIPT) in a multi-group (MG) multicasting (MC) framework capable of handling heterogeneous types of users, viz., information decoding (ID) specific, energy harvesting (EH) explicit, and/or both ID and EH operations concurrently. Precoding is a technique well-known for handling the inter-user interference in multi-user systems, however, the joint design with SWIPT is not yet fully exploited. Herein, we investigate the potential benefits of having a dedicated precoder for the set of users with EH demands, in addition to the MC precoding. We study the system performance of the aforementioned system from the perspectives of weighted sum of signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) and fairness. In this regard, we formulate the precoder design problems for (i) maximizing the weighted sum of SINRs at the intended users and (ii) maximizing the minimum of SINRs at the intended users; both subject to the constraints on minimum (non-linear) harvested energy, an upper limit on the total transmit power and a minimum SINR required to close the link. We solve the above-mentioned problems using distinct iterative algorithms with the help of semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and slack-variable replacement (SVR) techniques, following suitable transformations pertaining the problem convexification. The main novelty of the proposed approach lies in the ability to jointly design the MC and EH precoders for serving the heterogeneously classified ID and EH users present in distinct groups, respectively. We illustrate the comparison between the proposed weighted sum-SINR and fairness models via simulation results, carried out under various parameter values and operating conditions.