Joint optimization for PS-based SWIPT Multiuser Systems with Non-linear Energy Harvesting

In this paper, we investigate the performance of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) multiuser systems, in which a base station serves a set of users with both information and energy simultaneously via a power splitting (PS) mechanism. To capture realistic scenarios, a nonlinear energy harvesting (EH) model is considered. In particular, we jointly design the PS factors and the beamforming vectors in order to maximize the total harvested energy, subjected to rate requirements and a total transmit power budget. To deal with the inherent non-convexity of the formulated problem, an iterative optimization algorithm is proposed based on the inner approximation method and semide-finite relaxation (SDR), whose convergence is theoretically guaranteed. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the baseline max-min based SWIPT multicast and fixed-power PS designs.