Wireless information and power transfer in MIMO channels under Rician fading

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) offers an attractive alternative to the traditional battery limited or grid dependent communication system design. In this paper, we investigate robust precoder designs for systems with SWIPT capabilities under a stochastic Rician fading framework. Under a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel model, we formulate the problem of minimizing the average mean-square error at the information receiver (IR) while keeping the average energy harvested at the energy receiver (ER) above given levels. We consider two different strategies that can be adopted by the IR: i) simple estimation filters based solely on the channel mean, ii) robust estimation filters aiming to minimize the average mean-square error. Both of these scenarios lead to non-convex formulations. For the first scenario, we propose a convex relaxation that is tight. For the second scenario, we propose an alternating minimization method that provides precoder designs even in the scenarios where the number of transmit antennas is larger than the length of data vector. Our numerical results show that the proposed designs provide significant performance gains especially when the scattering component of the channel is strong.