On the Transfer of Information and Energy in Multi-User Systems

The problem of joint transfer of information and energy for wireless links has been recently investigated in light of emerging applications such as RFID and body area networks. Specifically, recent work has shown that the additional requirements of providing sufficient energy to the receiver significantly affects the design of the optimal communication strategy. In contrast to most previous works, this letter focuses on baseline multi-user systems, namely multiple access and multi-hop channels, and demonstrates that energy transfer constraints call for additional coordination among distributed nodes of a wireless network. The analysis is carried out using information-theoretic tools, and specific examples are worked out to illustrate the main conclusions.