Wireless information and power transfer: Architecture design and rate-energy tradeoff

Simultaneous information and power transfer over the wireless channels potentially offers great convenience to mobile users. Yet practical receiver designs impose technical constraints on its hardware realization, as practical circuits for harvesting energy from radio signals are not yet able to decode the carried information directly. To make theoretical progress, we propose a general receiver operation, namely, dynamic power splitting (DPS), which splits the received signal with adjustable power for energy harvesting and for information decoding. Moreover, we propose two types of practical receiver architectures, namely, separated versus integrated information and energy receivers. The integrated receiver integrates the front-end components of the separated receiver, thus achieving a smaller form factor. The rate-energy tradeoff for these two architectures are characterized by a so-called rate-energy (R-E) region. Numerical results show that the R-E region of the integrated receiver is superior to that of the separated receiver when more harvested power is desired.