Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in interference alignment networks

Interference alignment (IA) is a promising solution for interference management in wireless networks. On the other hand, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has become an emerging technique. Although some works have been done on IA and SWIPT, these two important areas have traditionally been addressed separately in the literature. In this paper, we propose to use a common framework to jointly study IA and SWIPT. We analyze the performance of SWIPT in IA networks. Specifically, we derive the upper bound of the power that can be harvested in IA networks. In addition, we show that, to improve the performance of wireless power transfer and information transmission, users should be dynamically selected as energy harvesting or information decoding terminals. Furthermore, we design two SWIPT-user selection (SWIPT-US) algorithms in IA networks. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.