Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer in mmWave Networks Under User-Centric Base Station Clustering

User-centric base station (BS) deployment has been designed for the fifth-generation (5G) dense millimeter wave (mmWave) networks for alleviating the inter-cell interference and improving the cell-edge user experience. However, the system power consumption increases sharply with the network density. In this paper, we investigate a user-centric simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) mmWave system employing a time-switching protocol at users to allow both energy harvesting (EH) and data decoding. To enable user-centric BS cooperation, adaptive BS clustering model is used to determine the user’s serving cluster based on its channel condition. Considering both linear and non-linear EH models, we analyze the joint coverage, namely, the probability that the user harvests enough energy in a given time slot and receives the required data from its serving cluster. The random serving clusters and the correlation between the amount of harvested energy and received data rate make the joint coverage analysis more challenging. A tractable tight approximation of the joint coverage probability is thus derived for ultra-dense networks. A mathematical optimization model for the time switching coefficient is also developed to maximize the system joint rate and energy coverage performance. All mathematical expressions are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations. Our results show that the proposed analytical framework is accurate and efficient for the design and deployment of SWIPT-enabled user-centric mmWave networks.