High-rate relay beamforming for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer

Abstract

A high-rate beamforming design is reported for amplify-and-forward wireless relay networks with simultaneous information and power transfer. To achieve high sum rate, a new relay beamformer is designed to support multi-pair source-destination communication links as well as an energy receiver simultaneously, instead of serving one information transmitter at a time. An energy-harvesting constrained sum-rate maximisation problem for this design is formulated, then relaxed and reformulated into a series of convex problems, which can be iteratively solved in polynomial time, eventually leading to a high-rate beamforming solution. Simulation results confirm the performance gain and fast convergence of the developed beamforming design.