Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

(SWIPT)

Recently, there is a lot of interest to integrate energy harvesting technologies into

communication networks. Several studies have considered and have investigated

optimal resource allocation techniques for different objective functions and

topologies. However, the discontinuous and random behaviour of these energy

sources makes energy harvesting critical for applications where most conventional

harvesting technologies are only applicable in certain environments. An energy

harvesting technology that overcomes these restrictions, is wireless power transfer

(WPT), where the nodes charge their batteries from electromagnetic radiation. In

WPT, the energy can be harvested either from ambient signals opportunistically, or

from a dedicated source in a fully-controlled manner; in the lattercase, green energy

transfer can take place from more powerful nodes (e.g. base stations) that exploit

conventional forms of renewable energy. Initial efforts on WPT have focused on

long-distance and high-power applications. However, both the low efficiency of the

transmission process and health concerns for such high-power applications prevented

their further development. Therefore, most recent WPT research has focused on near-

field energy transmission through inductive coupling. With sensors and wireless

transceivers getting ever smaller and more energy efficient, we envision that radio

waves will not only become a major source of energy for operating these devices, but

their information and energy transmission aspects will also be unified. Simultaneous

wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) can result in significant gains in

terms of spectral efficiency, time delay, energy consumption, and interference

management by superposing information and power transfer. For example, wireless

implants can be charged and calibrated concurrently with the same signal and wireless

sensor nodes can be charged with the control signals they receive from the access

point. In cellular systems with small cells, massive multiple-input multiple-output

(MIMO) and millimeterwave technologies will overcome current path-loss effects; in

this case, SWIPT could be integrated as an efficient way to mutually support high

throughputs and energy sustainability. The SWIPT requires the splitting of the

received signal in two orthogonal parts. Recent SWIPT techniques that separate the

received signal in the domains of time, power, antenna, and space are presented.

this simultaneous transfer is not possible in practice, as the energy harvesting

operation performed in the RF domain destroys the information content. To

practically achieve SWIPT, the received signal has to be split in two distinct parts,

one for energy harvesting and one for information decoding. In the following, the

techniques that have been proposed to achieve this signal splitting in different

domains (time, power, antenna, space) are discussed.

A. Time Switching (TS)

If TS is employed, the receiver switches in time between information decoding and

energy harvesting [6]. In this case, the signal splitting is performed in the time domain

and thus the entire signal received in one time slot is used either for information

decoding or power transfer (Fig. 3a). The TS technique allows for a simple hardware

implementation at the receiver but requires accurate time synchronization and

information/energy scheduling.

B. Power Splitting (PS)

The PS technique achieves SWIPT by splitting the received signal in two streams of

different power levels using a PS component; one signal stream is sent to the rectenna
circuit for energy harvesting and the other is converted to baseband for information

decoding (Fig. 3b) [6]. The PS technique entails a higher receiver complexity

compared to TS and requires the optimization of the PS factor α; however, it achieves

instantaneous SWIPT, as the signal received in one time slot is used for both

information decoding and power transfer. Therefore, it is more suitable for

applications with critical information/energy or delay constraints and closer to the

information theoretical optimum.

Fig. 3. SWIPT transmission techniques in different domains: a) time, b) power where α denotes the PS factor.

SWIPT provides three types of gain. First, wireless devices with SWIPT support are

able to search energy when receiving data for extending their lifetime. Second,

compared to the conventional time-division multiplexing mechanism, where the

transmissions of power and information are separate, the transmission efficiency

under SWIPT is improved. Third, with SWIPT, the interference to the

communications is kept under control and can even be beneficial for energy

harvesting (EH).

Typical SWIPT architectures are shown in Fig. 1, where the time switching refers to

the architecture in which each receiving antenna periodically switches between the

energy harvester and the information decoder, and the power splitting refers to the

architecture, where the received signal is divided into two separate signal streams,
with one being sent to the energy harvester and the other to the information decoder.

To realize SWIPT in practical wireless systems, sophisticated receivers have been

designed based on these two architectures. In particular, antenna switching [1] is

devised where the receiving antennas are separated into two groups with one group

dedicated to information decoding and the other to EH. Nevertheless, this design is

essentially a special case of the power splitting architecture with binary splitting

power

ratios. Another notable practical receiver design is dynamic power splitting [2] where

an adjustable power ratio for EH and information decoding is designed.

Given these architectures, corresponding technologies need to be developed to

successfully implement SWIPT in wireless systems. These technologies are

summarized in the next section.

Enabling Technologies for SWIPT:

Enabling SWIPT in wireless systems requires the integration of multiple technologies

such as multi-antenna transmission, EH, resource allocation, and signal processing.

The state of the art of these technologies is briefly discussed in this section.

Multi-Antenna Transmission

Among the efforts searching for a solution to reducing the transmission range of

SWIPT, the idea of installing multiple antennas on devices appears to be sound and

feasible, as multiple antennas not only can increase the antenna aperture, but also

can attain higher gain. In order to arrange multiple antennas into a small pocket-sized

device, a higher communication frequency would be useful for SWIPT systems.

Incidentally, equipping a SWIPT system with multiple antennas enables two different
signal processing techniques: analog domain beamforming and digital domain

precoding. The former can be realized by a complex weighting phase shifter, and the

latter can be specially designed to satisfy some predefined power or rate

conditions/constraints. An issue that arises and needs to be addressed

in multi-antenna transmissions is co-channel interference, because the system consists

of multiple users. In this regard, various existing interference

alleviation techniques (e.g., block diagonalization precoding [3], which sends

information to interference-free receivers and energy to others) may be applied in

SWIPT systems to deal with this issue.

Efficient Energy Harvesting

Toward achieving a green and self-sustaining system that requires less energy from

fixed sources, efficient EH methods and techniques need to be

considered in SWIPT systems. Unlike traditional EH sources such as solar power,

wind, and tide, the location of a transceiver has a great impact

on the EH performance in SWIPT. A SWIPT-enabled transmitter can work in either a

periodic manner or a time-varying manner. When most of the nodes in the system

have a strong power level, SWIPT may be turned off by the system for reduced

overhead. On the other hand, when most of the nodes in the system suffer from a lack

of power, SWIPT may be turned on to power the nodes. EH for SWIPT has been

explored in opportunistic and cooperative ways. An optimal time switching rule for a

point-to-point wireless link over the flat-fading channel subject to the time-varying

co-channel interference was derived in [4], where the receiver was assumed to have

no fixed power

supplies, and thus needs to replenish energy from the unintended interference and/or

the intended signal sent by the transmitter. Relay selection for achieving a trade-off
between the efficiency of the information transmission to the receiver and

the amount of energy transferred to the energy harvesters has been studied recently,

and a relay selection policy that yields the optimal trade-off was proposed in [5]. The

latest progress on efficient EH techniques in SWIPT implementation can be found in

[6].

Resource Allocation

Resource allocation in SWIPT systems primarily refers to the optimization of the

utilization of various limited resources in the system, such as energy, bandwidth, time,

and space. Of course, any required or predefined constraints with respect to

relevant parameters must be satisfied. Due to the dual identities of RF signals,

transmitting information and power simultaneously calls for joint consideration of

resource allocation with power control and user scheduling, which

entails the following two things. First, opportunistic power control can be used to

improve the energy and information transfer efficiency by exploiting the channel

fading feature. Second, idle users who have high channel gains can be scheduled for

power transfer to prolong the network lifetime. It has been discovered that with

optimal

power control consideration, both the system capacity and the harvested energy

increase significantly, and the average harvested energy can be improved as well.

Moreover, resource allocation is an effective way to mitigate the interference in

wireless systems. With SWIPT, harmful interference to a system can be turned into

useful energy for the system. An interference-based resource allocation mechanism

can gather the interference and direct it to specific energy-hungry devices, thereby

enhancing the system’s performance.

SWIPT application have two types of separated receivers, namely, the time switching

(TS) and power splitting (PS) architectures [3], [4]. In TS-based SWIPT (TS-SWIPT),

the receiver harvests power from an energy signal sent by the source and then receives

the source transmitted information signal in a time-division manner. In PS-based

SWIPT (PS-SWIPT), the receiver extracts energy from the received source signal

with the aid of PS. Generally, PS-SWIPT reduces the timeslots consumed compared

with

TS-SWIPT, so that the information transmission time, as well as the spectral

efficiency, can be increased. The applications of TS-SWIPT and PS-SWIPT have

been considered in various wireless systems, such as multiple-input multiple-output

(MIMO) systems [4], orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems [5],

cognitive systems [6], and cellular systems [7], [8].

SWIPT can harvest the energy from the interfering signals and reuse the spectrum in

an efficient manner to minimize the interference. The NOMA technique is used

to mitigate the inter-user interference by using successive interference cancellation

(SIC) at the receiver side, where multiple users can share the same channel. With the

help of the NOMA technique, multiplexed users having better channel conditions can

successfully decode the data whereas users having poor channel conditions decode the

data after passing through the SIC technique [7]. Most of the wireless communication

models have assumed that the channel state information (CSI) is known to the

transmitter which seems to be impractical in most cases. Unknown CSI also known as

imperfect which makes the system complex and requires an adaptive mechanism to

reduce the error.

To improve the reliability of the far NOMA users without draining the near users’ batteries, we

consider the application of SWIPT to NOMA, where SWIPT is performed at the near NOMA users.

Therefore, the aforementioned two communication concepts, cooperative NOMA and SWIPT, can be

naturally linked together, and a new spectrally and energy efficient wireless multiple access protocol,

namely, the cooperative SWIPT NOMA protocol.

We consider a network with a single source S (i.e., the BS) and two groups of

randomly deployed users {Ai} and {Bi}. We assume that the users in group {Bi} are

deployed within disc DB with radius RDB. The far users {Ai} are deployed within

ring DA with radius RDC and RDA(assuming RDC RDB), as shown in Fig. 1. Note

that the BS is located at the origin of both the disc DB and the ring DA. The locations

of the near and far users are modeled as homogeneous PPPs κ (κ ∈ {A,B}) with

densities λκ. Here the near users are uniformly distributed within the disc and the far

users are uniformly distributed within the ring. we consider that the users in {Bi} are

energy harvesting relays that harvest energy from the BS and forward the information

to {Ai} using the harvested energy as their transmit powers. The DF strategy is

applied at {Bi} and the cooperative NOMA system consists of two phases, detailed

in the following.
Fig. 1. An illustration of a downlink SWIPT NOMA system with a base station S

(blue circle). The spatial distributions of the near users (yellow circles) and the far

users (green circles)

Transmit Antenna Selection (TAS):

Using multiple antennas simultaneously at the transmitter requires several

parallel radio frequency (RF) chains in the front end architecture of
transmitter. As such, it increases system complexity, power consumption
and cost with increase in number of antennas [13]. To overcome such
issues, transmit antenna selection (TAS) is often preferred to make
transmitter structure simple. TAS opportunistically selects a single best
antenna out of multiple antennas and uses a single RF chain for
transmission. This drastically reduces the complexity, power
consumption, cost as well as size at the expense of generally acceptable
loss in
performance [14]. In this paper, we present a novel TAS-NOMA scheme
which can be implemented in downlink communication from a base
station equipped with multiple antennas to multiple users each equipped
with single antenna. We target to improve the sum rate considering the
target user rate is allocated opportunistically based on its channel
conditions.
The possible sum rates that can be achieved from each transmit antenna
are investigated and then we select the best antenna that can provide
maximum sum rate. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
In Section II, we discuss the system model under consideration.

Fig. 1: System Model for TAS-NOMA scheme

TAS-NOMA
At any given moment, different transmit antennas at the base station
experience different environments due to time varying nature of fading
channels resulting random signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. In a
conventional TAS scheme comprising single transmitter and single user,
a
transmit antenna that has best channel condition with the
user is selected from rest of the transmit antennas exploiting
the channel variations. However, the scenario under consideration in our
case is multiuser where the superimposed message has to be broadcasted
to all the users at once using NOMA. From the m-th user’s perspective, a
transmit antenna that has best channel condition with it, may
or may not have similar channel conditions with rest of the
users. As such, conventional TAS scheme cannot be directly
employed. Since, our aim is to select only one antenna out of
N possible antennas as the transmitter is constrained with a
single RF chain, an optimal approach is to select the antenna
that would achieve maximum sum rate when the
superimposed message is broadcasted to all the users. We
refer this solution as TAS-NOMA. In NOMA, it is very common to
assume that instantaneous CSI is available at the transmitter side [4],
[16]. As such,
base station can easily calculate sum rates that can be
achieved by each transmit antenna using (5). Data rates at
each user with respect to each transmit antenna would vary
independently. Consequently, the sum rate provided by each
transmit antenna would also vary. As explained above, we
choose the transmit antenna that can provide highest sum
rate by exploiting spatial diversity. Hence, the sum rate for
TAS-NOMA can be expressed as

where n∗ is index of the best antenna that can achieve highest

sum rate. It should be remembered that although the proposed
technique is optimal method but it requires N × M feedback
to select the best antenna because each user has to feedback
CSI related to all transmit antennas. If the feedback channel
is limited, we can switch to sub-optimal method as explained
in [17].
We consider a downlink cellular scenario comprising of
one base station and M number of mobile users as shown in
Fig. 1. The base station is equipped with N number of
transmit antennas while each mobile users are equipped with
a single antenna. We assume all the channels are quasi-static
Rayleigh fading with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN)
so that the channels are constant for a block of transmission
and this constant within blocks vary independently. The
complex channel coefficient between n-th antenna of base
station and m-th mobile user is denoted by hn m with zero
mean and unit variance such that n ∈ (1, 2, ..., N) and
m ∈ (1, 2, ..., M). The channel between each antenna at
transmitter and receiver pair are sorted in ascending order.
For example, the channels for n-th antenna at transmitter and
M number of users are sorted in the ascending order as
|hn 1 |2 ≤ |hn 2 |2 ≤ .. ≤ |hn m|2.. ≤ |hn M|2. According to NOMA
protocol, transmitter possesses channel state information
(CSI) of all the mobile users. Based on the CSI values,
transmitter allocates power to each mobile user.

TAS scheme is aimed to enhance the robustness of the two-user NOMA

transmissions. Considering a NOMA downlink transmission where a BS,
denoted by S, simultaneously communicates with a cell center user,
named User N, and a cell-edge user, called User F, by employing a two-
user NOMA scheme as shown in Fig. 1. The NOMA communication is
overheard by an eavesdropper, denoted by E. The BS is equipped with K
antennas while each user is equipped with single antenna. Let hiT denote
the fading coefficient of a channel from an antenna i; i = 1; : : : ; K to a
User T, where T 2 fN; F; Eg. Assuming all wireless channels in the
network exhibit Rayleigh block flat fading, hiT can be modeled as
independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) complex Gaussian random
variables with zero-mean and variance λST. Additionally, let nT denote
the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) at User T, with zero-mean
and variance σT2. Thus, the channel gain jhXYj2, where X 2 fig and Y 2
fN; F; Eg, is an exponential random variable with probability density
function (PDF), fjhXYj2(z) = λ1XY e- λzXY ; 8z ≥ 0, otherwise, i.e., z <
0, fjhXYj2(z) = 0, where λXY denotes the mean of jhXYj2. Additionally,
the average channel gain can be written as E[jhXYj2] = (dXY=d0)-L [7],
where dXY represents the distance between two nodes (in meters),
stands for pathloss exponent, d0 denotes the reference distance, and L is
the average signal power attenuation at d0.

Fig. 1. An illustration of a two-user NOMA system with TAS under the

present of an eavesdropper.

outage probability analysis of uplink power-domain NOMA is derived in

[6] where a closed-form expression is obtained for Rayleigh fading
channels. Ding et al. [7] considered NOMA as a special cognitive radio
(CR) network where the user with weak channel is taken as primary user
(PU) having priority in terms of quality-of-service. The performance of
PU is improved in return of a considerable degradation in the
performance of the user with stronger channel. As a result, CR inspired
NOMA does not provide fairness for both users. In [8], authors developed
a novel dynamic power allocation scheme for DL/UL NOMA scenarios
with two users, for which power allocation factors are dynamically
adjusted based on the instantaneous channel gains feedback from the
receivers. This approach provides a balanced solution between user
fairness and system performance in exchange to a more complex scheme.
In [9], a threshold based power allocation scheme is proposed, which
fixes the power difference of the users and is obtained by bisection
search. It is concluded that the scheme in [9] outperforms the
conventional bisection search algorithm in terms of the error performance
of users. In [10], a transmit antenna selection (TAS) scheme in NOMA to
achieve higher sum rate in multi-antenna BS and single antenna multiuser
scenario is proposed. The transmit antenna providing maximum sum rate
is selected at base station (BS). The authors show that higher sum rate can
be achieved using TAS in comparison to single antenna system in
NOMA. In this paper, a TAS scheme for DL NOMA is proposed, which
provides opportunity to balance the sum rate and fairness performance
between users. The considered NOMA network is composed of a BS with
Nt transmit antennas and two single antenna users. TAS is performed
through two stages at BS as follows: In the first stage, k out of Nt
transmit antennas are chosen, which provides k largest sum rates in the
descending order. In the second stage, fairness indices with respect to k
largest sum rates are calculated and the antenna providing maximum
fairness is selected. Thus, antenna selection is performed in a fairer way
while ensuring improvement in sum rate. Through adjusting k, it is
possible to maximize fairness at the expense of a degradation in sum rate
or vice versa due to the trade-off between them. Since it is not important
to increase fairness or sum rate when the system error performance is
quite bad, a power allocation technique is considered.