Energy Harvesting for Internet of Things with Heterogeneous Users

We study the energy harvesting problem in the Internet of Things with heterogeneous users, where there are three types of single-antenna users: ID users that only receive information, EH users that can only receive energy, and ID/EH users that receive information and energy simultaneously from a multiantenna base station via power splitting. We aim to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the ID users and ID/EH users by jointly designing the power allocation at the transmitter and the power splitting strategy at the ID/EH receivers under the maximum transmit power and the minimum energy harvesting constraints. Specifically, we first apply the semidefinite relaxation (SDR), zero-forcing (ZF), and maximum ratio transmission (MRT) techniques to solve the nonconvex problems. We then apply the zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC) technique to eliminate the multiuser interference and derive the closed-form optimal solution. Numerical results show that ZF-DPC provides higher achievable minimum SINR than SDR and ZF in most cases.