Design and Implementation of Beamforming and Resource Management in Wireless-Powered Communications

With the coming of the internet of thing (IoT), wireless energy transfer using electromagnetic radiation has been proposed for remote wireless devices to resolve an energy-hungry problem due to the growth of wireless data services. This technology realizes truly wireless communications without tethering to electricity grids or requiring battery replacement. While it enables far-field wireless power charging, some challenges remain to be overcome before it can be successfully applied in practice. First, the energy transfer performance is degraded by wireless channels during the radio frequency (RF) signal propagation, especially when the distance between an access point and a wireless device is increased. Second, there is a need to decide when to transfer energy and when to transmit data so that the overall quality-of-service (QoS) can be satisfied. Third, simultaneous energy transfer and information transfer cause interference in the environments. Hence, it is critical to control interference for data transmission, while recycling the interference as a useful resource for wirelessly charging. The goal of this project is to address the aforementioned problems by jointly considering antenna beamforming and resource management for wireless-powered communications and to develop a software defined radio (SDR) platform for real experiments. In the first year of this project, we will first propose the optimal/robust designs for multiple access in uplink with perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI), where multiple wireless-powered devices relying on downlink power chagrining for uplink data transmission. As an extension of this project in the second year, we will focus on two emerging application paradigms in the IoT: device-to-device (D2D) communications and multiple user-pairs communications, to provide the functionality of wirelessly charging. The joint design of antenna beamforming and resource management will take into account the QoS of wireless-powered devices, while maximizing the system throughput. Both computer simulation and theoretical analysis will be conducted to evaluate the overall network performance of our proposed algorithms. The impact of several design factors, like antenna beamforming, power control, time allocation, on the performance will be extensively studied. Meanwhile, we will build up an SDR platform for wireless-powered communications and perform the feasibility study of wireless-powered communications in real wireless environments by incorporating the designed algorithms. The applications and the platform developed in this project can be served as a reference example of wireless-powered communications.