Energy harvesting for internet of things with heterogeneous users

Abstract

We study the energy harvesting problem in the Internet of Things with heterogeneous users, where there are three types of single-antenna users: ID users that only receive information, EH users that can only receive energy, and ID/EH users that receive information and energy simultaneously from a multiantenna base station via power splitting. We aim to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the ID users and ID/EH users by jointly designing the power allocation at the transmitter and the power splitting strategy at the ID/EH receivers under the maximum transmit power and the minimum energy harvesting constraints. Specifically, we first apply the semidefinite relaxation (SDR), zero-forcing (ZF), and maximum ratio transmission (MRT) techniques to solve the nonconvex problems. We then apply the zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC) technique to eliminate the multiuser interference and derive the closed-form optimal solution. Numerical results show that ZF-DPC provides higher achievable minimum SINR than SDR and ZF in most cases.