Simultaneous information and power transfer under a non-linear RF energy harvesting model

In the design of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems, it has been typically assumed that energy conversion efficiency is independent from the level of the input power at the energy receiver. On the other hand, in practice the energy conversion efficiency exhibits a nonlinear behavior and highly depends on the input power. This leads to a discrepancy between the practical energy harvesting (EH) hardware available and the resource allocation designs made for the SWIPT systems. This work is concerned with this issue. In particular, we propose a practical quadratic model for the power conversion efficiency in EH circuitry. Comparisons with the constant efficiency models used in conventional SWIPT system design as well as another non-linear model proposed in the literature are made. With its convexity properties together with the good match it provides for the measurement data from practical EH circuitry, the proposed model is shown to be a promising alternative to the existing EH approaches. Using the proposed model, the problem of resource allocation for a multiuser Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) system is investigated. The performance improvement due to the usage of the proposed non-linear model is illustrated.