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A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) enhanced simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system is investigated, in which a multi-antenna access point (AP) provides communication service and power supply for multiple single-antenna information decoding receivers (IDRs) and energy harvesting receivers (EHRs), respectively. To fully investigate the potential of STAR-RIS, three types of STAR-RIS protocols are employed in the SWIPT systems, namely the energy splitting (ES), the mode switching (MS), and the time switching (TS) protocols. The weighted sum power maximization problem is formulated for each STAR-RIS protocol to maximize the sum power received at the EHRs by jointly optimizing the beamforming at the AP and STAR-RIS. The non-convex problem for each STAR-RIS protocol is handled by the proposed low-complexity Gaussian randomization-based and high-precision penalty-based joint optimization algorithms to provide a more comprehensive range of algorithmic choices. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the AP only needs to send the information beam to achieve the best power supply and communication service in adopting any STAR-RIS protocol. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that: 1) the proposed schemes can achieve higher sum received power compared to the benchmarks; 2) the sum power received at the EHRs of the three STAR-RIS protocols can be ranked as ES > TS > MS; and 3) the performance gap in sum power received between penalty-based and Gaussian random algorithms depends on the number of STAR-RIS elements.
Li et al. (Tue,) studied this question.