Power allocation optimization for hybrid information and energy transfer with massive MIMO downlink

Abstract

This paper investigates the power allocation in a massive multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) downlink system, where the base station (BS) simultaneously transmits information and energy to information terminals and energy terminals without resorting to any wireless energy harvesting (EH) protocol, respectively. First, with respect to this system, the closed‐form expressions of achievable rate and harvested energy are, respectively, derived for Rayleigh fading channels. Then, from these expressions, three optimization problems are formulated based on quality‐of‐service (QoS) requirements, with the purposes of maximizing achievable sum rate, harvested sum energy and joint QoS requirements, respectively. The optimization problem of maximizing achievable sum rate is transformed into a sequence of geometric programmings (GPs), which can be solved efficiently with standard convex optimization tools. The optimization problem of maximizing harvested sum energy is proved to be solvable as a linear program. The optimization problem of maximizing joint QoS requirements is shown to be a multi‐objective optimization problem (MOOP) and solved by a one‐dimensional search based on GP. Finally, numerical results manifest that the proposed power allocation algorithms can provide good system performances of achievable sum rate and harvested sum energy, and jointly guarantee QoS fairness in terms of achievable rate and harvested energy.