Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer mechanism in interference alignment relay networks

Abstract

This paper considers a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) mechanism in an interference alignment (IA) relay system, in which source nodes send wireless information and energy simultaneously to relay nodes, and relay nodes forward the received signal to destination nodes powered by harvested energy. To manage interference and utilize interference as energy source, two-SWIPT receiver is designed, namely, power splitting (PS), and antennas switching (AS) has been considered for relay system. The performance of AS- and PS-based IA relay systems is considered, as is a new energy cooperation (ECop) scheme that is proposed to improve system performance. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of all schemes and it is shown from the simulations that the performance of proposed ECop outperformed both AS and PS.