Energy-efficient alternating current computing-enabled receiver design for K-user interference channel simultaneous wireless information and power transfer networks

Energy efficiency is one of the key challenges in fifth generation (5G) and beyond wireless communication systems. Recently, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems are usually adopted to enhance energy efficiency. The harvested energy through power transfer is first rectified to generate the direct current (DC) voltage that is used to power the communication devices. This rectification reduces the energy efficiency due to losses in conversion to DC voltages. In this work, we consider integrated information decoding and energy harvesting receiver architecture through power splitting SWIPT network that enables alternating current (AC) computational logic. The AC computing method is used to supply the computing block of receivers to further enhance the energy efficiency. Multiuser multiple input single output (MISO) interference channel (IC) is considered, where receivers are required to compromise between quality of service (QoS) and energy consumption. The system sum rate is maximized under sum harvested energy and total transmit power constraints through joint beamforming and power splitting factors design. For the problem tractability in the proposed AC computing-enabled receiver, standard beamforming schemes are deployed, namely, zero forcing (ZF), regularized zero forcing (RZF), maximum ratio transmission (MRT), and a hybrid scheme between MRT and ZF beamforming (MRT-ZF). Moreover, the power splitting ratios design problem is transformed into a one dimension search problem. Simulation results show that different beamforming designs exhibit a great trade-off between the achieved rate and the harvested energy.