Antenna Selection and Hybrid Beamforming for Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Multi-Group Multicasting Systems

In this paper, low-cost alternatives to full digital beamforming, namely, antenna selection and hybrid beamforming, are proposed for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in a multi-group multicasting scenario. The joint problem can be outlined as the design of beamformer weight vectors and power splitting ratios in order to satisfy both signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio and harvested power constraints at each user with minimum transmission power. We first develop an efficient algorithm for antenna selection by converting the original mixed integer programming problem into a continuous one and adapting feasible point pursuit-successive convex approximation. Second, a new hybrid beamforming structure is presented for multi-group multicasting. Both continuous and discrete-phase hybrid beamformers are considered in this content. Two algorithms for continuous-phase case are developed by employing two competing techniques. In addition, a special two-bit discrete-phase hybrid beamformer design is considered for practical systems. The integer constraints are converted into linear equality and inequalities for this specific structure and an efficient algorithm is designed. The proposed algorithms are compared for different scenarios revealing some interesting characteristics of each technique.