On the Study of Sustainability and Outage of SWIPT-Enabled Wireless Communications

Wireless power transfer technologies such as simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) have shown significant potential to revolutionise the design of future wireless communication systems. When the only energy source is from the wireless signals that are mainly intended for information communications, the sustainability and outage performance of SWIPT systems become critical factors in theoretical evaluation and practical applications. This paper firstly models the energy harvesting and energy consumption of the power splitting protocol based SWIPT systems to investigate the general sustainability condition. We further model the power and information transfer outage probabilities using Markov Chains, which are unique for SWIPT systems since they both could cause communication outage. We further demonstrate how to apply the closed-form expression of the outage to optimise the key parameter of splitting ratio for SWIPT systems. Hardware and numerical experiments demonstrate the validity of the proposed model and outage analysis, and confirm the effectiveness of the solution to calculate the optimal splitting ratios under different signal and channel conditions.