Hybrid Beamforming Based SWIPT System Satisfying Individual Rate and Energy Constraints

In this paper, we consider a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system adopting hybrid analog-digital beamforming where a base station (BS) with massive antennas transmits different data streams to multiple single-antenna devices. Our primary objective is to minimize the transmit-power of the BS while ensuring energy harvesting and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements of each device. We specifically highlight that our approach can accommodate the scenarios where users have different requirements on the harvested energy and the received SINR. We propose two suboptimal solutions in which digital and analog precoders are designed jointly. In the first solution (OptDig-ProRF), the objective function is approximated to be independent of the digital precoder and power splitting ratios, and the local minimum of the objective function is found to obtain an analog precoder. Subsequently, the optimal digital precoder and power splitting ratios are found for the obtained analog precoder using semidefinite relaxation of the original problem. In the second solution (ZfDig-SohRF), to reduce computational complexity, we newly design a zero-forcing (ZF) digital precoder which meets users’ requirements while applying the corresponding analog precoder proposed in the literature. The two precoders are iteratively found until the transmit power difference between two consecutive updates falls below a threshold. Illustrative results show that the OptDig-ProRF scheme yields a very close performance to the fully digital precoder in terms of transmit power, while the ZfDig-SohRF scheme outperforms the optimal digital precoder plus a conventional analog precoder scheme at high SINR constraints.