Collaborative Wireless Energy and Information Transfer in Interference Channel

This paper studies the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a multiuser wireless system, in which distributed transmitters send independent messages to their respective receivers, and at the same time cooperatively transmit wireless power to the receivers via energy beamforming. Accordingly, from the wireless information transmission (WIT) perspective, the system of interest can be modeled as the classic interference channel, while it also can be regarded as a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system for collaborative wireless energy transmission (WET). To enable both information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) in SWIPT, we adopt the low-complexity time switching operation at each receiver to switch between the ID and EH modes over scheduled time. For the hybrid system, we aim to characterize the achievable rate-energy (R-E) trade-offs by various transmitter-side collaboration schemes. Specifically, to facilitate the collaborative energy beamforming, we propose a new signal splitting scheme at the transmitters, where each transmit signal is generally split into an information signal and an energy signal for WIT and WET, respectively. With this new scheme, first, we study the two-user SWIPT system over the fading channel and derive the optimal mode switching rule at the receivers as well as the corresponding transmit signal optimization to achieve various R-E trade-offs. We also compare the R-E performance of our proposed scheme with transmit energy beamforming and signal splitting against two existing schemes with partial or no cooperation of the transmitters. Next, the general case of SWIPT systems with more than two users is studied, for which we propose a practical transmit collaboration scheme by extending the result for the two-user case: we group users into different pairs and apply the cooperation schemes obtained in the two-user case to each paired group. Furthermore, we present a benchmarking scheme based on joint cooperation of all the transmitters inspired by the principle of interference alignment, against which the performance of the proposed scheme is compared.