Magnetic Induction-Based Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer for Single Information and Multiple Power Receivers

Magnetic induction (MI)-based communication systems have gained increased attention in recent years. Typical applications for these systems lie in the area of wireless power transfer, near-field communication (NFC), and wireless sensor networks in challenging environments. In this paper, a system for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) using MI-based signal transmission is designed for supporting one data stream and multiple parallel power streams. One of the possible applications for this scheme is an NFC-based access point. The overall system is optimized to guarantee a certain quality-of-service for the data stream as well as a maximum sum receive power for all power receivers (max-sum problem) or a maximum receive power for the worst power receiver (max-min problem), respectively. Both optimization problems turn out to be non-convex, such that the optimum solution cannot be found with limited computational complexity. Hence, we provide efficient suboptimal solutions. In this context, a convex approximation of the transmit power constraint in MI-based multiple-input multiple-output systems turns out to be very useful. A very high achievable power efficiency renders the proposed MI-based SWIPT system very promising.