On the optimal energy efficiency and spectral efficiency trade-off of CF massive MIMO SWIPT system

Abstract

Energy efficiency is a key requirement for future network design, and user-centric (UC) cell-free (CF) massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) networks can achieve over ten times the energy efficiency. Based on this, this paper studies a CF MIMO simultaneous wireless information and power transmission system and proposes a UC access point (AP) selection method and a trade-off performance optimization scheme for spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. In this system, users have both energy recovery and information transmission functions. According to the difference between the interference in the energy harvesting and information transmission process, a flexible AP selection scheme is designed. Blindly pursuing high spectral efficiency will result in waste of resources. This paper proposes an evaluation index that takes into account both energy efficiency and spectral efficiency, analyses the trade-off between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency, and jointly optimizes the AP selection scheme and the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) time switching ratio to maximize the trade-off performance. Then, the non-convex problem is converted to a geometric planning problem to solve. The simulation results show that by implementing a suitable AP selection scheme and UL and DL time allocation, the information processing scheme on the AP side has a slight loss in spectral efficiency, but the energy efficiency is close to the performance of global processing on the central processing unit.