Energy Sustainable IoT With Individual QoS Constraints Through MISO SWIPT Multicasting

Enabling technologies for energy sustainable Internet of Things (IoT) are of paramount importance since the proliferation of high data rate demands of low power network devices. In this paper, we consider a multiple input single output (MISO) multicasting system comprising of a multiantenna transmitter (TX) simultaneously transferring information and power to data hungry IoT nodes. Each IoT device is assumed to be equipped with power splitting (PS) hardware that enables energy harvesting (EH) and imposes an individual quality of service (QoS) constraint to the downlink communication. We study the joint design of TX precoding and IoT PS ratios for the considered MISO simultaneous wireless information and power transfer multicasting system with the objective of maximizing the minimum harvested energy among IoT, while satisfying their individual QoS requirements. In our novel EH fairness maximization formulation, we adopt a generic EH model capturing practical rectification operation, and resulting in a nonconvex optimization problem. For this problem, we first present an equivalent semi-definite relaxation formulation and then prove it possesses unique global optimality. We also derive tight upper and lower bounds on the globally optimal solution that are exploited in obtaining low complexity algorithmic implementations for the targeted joint design. Analytical expressions for the optimal TX beamforming directions, power allocation, and PS ratios are also presented. Representative numerical results including comparisons with benchmark designs corroborate the utility of proposed framework and provide useful insights on the interplay of key system parameters.