Throughput Optimization for Massive MIMO Systems Powered by Wireless Energy Transfer

This paper studies a wireless-energy-transfer (WET) enabled massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system (MM) consisting of a hybrid data-and-energy access point (H-AP) and multiple single-antenna users. In the WET-MM system, the H-AP is equipped with a large number M of antennas and functions like a conventional AP in receiving data from users, but additionally supplies wireless power to the users. We consider frame-based transmissions. Each frame is divided into three phases: the uplink channel estimation (CE) phase, the downlink WET phase, as well as the uplink wireless information transmission (WIT) phase. Firstly, users use a fraction of the previously harvested energy to send pilots, while the H-AP estimates the uplink channels and obtains the downlink channels by exploiting channel reciprocity. Next, the H-AP utilizes the channel estimates just obtained to transfer wireless energy to all users in the downlink via energy beamforming. Finally, the users use a portion of the harvested energy to send data to the H-AP simultaneously in the uplink (reserving some harvested energy for sending pilots in the next frame) . To optimize the throughput and ensure rate fairness, we consider the problem of maximizing the minimum rate among all users. In the large-M regime, we obtain the asymptotically optimal solutions and some interesting insights for the optimal design of WET-MM system.

I. Introduction

RECENTLY, far-field wireless energy transfer (WET) has emerged as a promising technology to address energy and lifetime bottlenecks for power-limited devices in wireless networks [1], [2]. WET refers to using the radiative electromagnetic (EM) wave emitted from a power transmitter to deliver energy to a power receiver (see [1], [2] and references therein). Since EM waves decay quickly over distances, to realize WET in practice, the EM energy needs to be concentrated into a narrow beam to achieve efficient transmission of power, also referred to as energy beamforming [3].