Gan Zheng

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in modern communication systems

Energy harvesting for wireless communication networks is a new paradigm that allows terminals to recharge their batteries from external energy sources in the surrounding environment. A promising energy harvesting technology is wireless power transfer where terminals harvest energy from electromagnetic radiation. Thereby, the energy may be harvested opportunistically from ambient electromagnetic sources or from sources that intentionally transmit electromagnetic energy for energy harvesting purposes. A particularly interesting and challenging scenario arises when sources perform simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), as strong signals not only increase power transfer but also interference. This article provides an overview of SWIPT systems with a particular focus on the hardware realization of rectenna circuits and practical techniques that achieve SWIPT in the domains of time, power, antennas, and space. The article also discusses the benefits of a potential integration of SWIPT technologies in modern communication networks in the context of resource allocation and cooperative cognitive radio networks.

Robust Cognitive Beamforming With Bounded Channel Uncertainties

This paper studies the robust beamforming design for a multi-antenna cognitive radio (CR) network, which transmits to multiple secondary users (SUs) and coexists with a primary network of multiple users. We aim to maximize the minimum of the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) of the SUs, subject to the constraints of the total SU transmit power and the received interference power at the primary users (PUs) by optimizing the beamforming vectors at the SU transmitter based on imperfect channel state information (CSI). To model the uncertainty in CSI, we consider a bounded region for both cases of channel matrices and channel covariance matrices. As such, the optimization is done while satisfying the interference constraints for all possible CSI error realizations. We shall first derive equivalent conditions for the interference constraints and then convert the problems into the form of semi-definite programming (SDP) with the aid of rank relaxation, which leads to iterative algorithms for obtaining the robust optimal beamforming solution. Results demonstrate the achieved robustness and the performance gain over conventional approaches and that the proposed algorithms can obtain the exact robust optimal solution with high probability.

Improving Physical Layer Secrecy Using Full-Duplex Jamming Receivers

This paper studies secrecy rate optimization in a wireless network with a single-antenna source, a multi-antenna destination and a multi-antenna eavesdropper. This is an unfavorable scenario for secrecy performance as the system is interference-limited. In the literature, assuming that the receiver operates in half duplex (HD) mode, the aforementioned problem has been addressed via use of cooperating nodes who act as jammers to confound the eavesdropper. This paper investigates an alternative solution, which assumes the availability of a full duplex (FD) receiver. In particular, while receiving data, the receiver transmits jamming noise to degrade the eavesdropper channel. The proposed self-protection scheme eliminates the need for external helpers and provides system robustness. For the case in which global channel state information is available, we aim to design the optimal jamming covariance matrix that maximizes the secrecy rate and mitigates loop interference associated with the FD operation. We consider both fixed and optimal linear receiver design at the destination, and show that the optimal jamming covariance matrix is rank-1, and can be found via an efficient 1-D search. For the case in which only statistical information on the eavesdropper channel is available, the optimal power allocation is studied in terms of ergodic and outage secrecy rates. Simulation results verify the analysis and demonstrate substantial performance gain over conventional HD operation at the destination.

Wireless Information and Power Transfer With Full Duplex Relaying

In this paper, we propose an innovative spatial-modulation (SM) based full-duplex (FD) decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocol where the energy-constrained dual-antenna relay is powered by the radio frequency (RF) energy from the single-antenna source using the time-switching (TS) architecture. In this system, either one or both of the relay antennas receive the energy signal from the source in the energy harvesting phase. In the information transmission phase, one of the two relay antennas is selected to be active to decode and forward the information transmitted from the source and the other relay antenna receives the information from the source at the same time. In this way, the throughput of the information transmission between the relay and the destination can be significantly improved by the additional information mapped to the active antenna index which consequently leads to the improvement of the overall system throughput. Since the current SM capacity solution is not in a closed-form, we propose two tight SM capacity upper bounds and present the solution of the optimal time split ratio for the maximum system throughput according to the proposed upper bound. Monte-carlo simulations are conducted to verify the analysis and reveal the throughput gain of the proposed SM-FD relaying protocol in comparison with conventional FD relaying protocol.

Low-Complexity End-to-End Performance Optimization in MIMO Full-Duplex Relay Systems

In this paper, we deal with the deployment of full-duplex relaying in amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative networks with multiple-antenna terminals. In contrast to previous studies, which focus on the spatial mitigation of the loopback interference (LI) at the relay node, a joint precoding/decoding design that maximizes the end-to-end (e2e) performance is investigated. The proposed precoding incorporates rank-1 zero-forcing (ZF) LI suppression at the relay node and is derived in closed-form by solving appropriate optimization problems. In order to further reduce system complexity, the antenna selection (AS) problem for full-duplex AF cooperative systems is discussed. We investigate different AS schemes to select a single transmit antenna at both the source and the relay, as well as a single receive antenna at both the relay and the destination. To facilitate comparison, exact outage probability expressions and asymptotic approximations of the proposed AS schemes are provided. In order to overcome zero-diversity effects associated with the AS operation, a simple power allocation scheme at the relay node is also investigated and its optimal value is analytically derived. Numerical and simulation results show that the joint ZF-based precoding significantly improves e2e performance, while AS schemes are efficient solutions for scenarios with strict computational constraints.

Collaborative-Relay Beamforming With Perfect CSI: Optimum and Distributed Implementation

This letter studies the collaborative use of amplify-and-forward (AF) relays to form a virtual multiple-input single-output (MISO) beamforming system with the aid of perfect channel state information (CSI) in a flat-fading channel. In particular, we optimize the relay weights jointly to maximize the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination terminal with both individual and total power constraints at the relays. We show that the optimal collaborative-relay beamforming (CRB) solution achieves the full diversity of a MISO antenna system. Another main contribution of this letter is a distributed algorithm that allows each individual relay to learn its own weight, based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) analysis.

Beamforming for MISO Interference Channels with QoS and RF Energy Transfer

We consider a multiuser multiple-input single-output interference channel where the receivers are characterized by both quality-of-service (QoS) and radio-frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) constraints. We consider the power splitting RF-EH technique where each receiver divides the received signal into two parts a) for information decoding and b) for battery charging. The minimum required power that supports both the QoS and the RF-EH constraints is formulated as an optimization problem that incorporates the transmitted power and the beamforming design at each transmitter as well as the power splitting ratio at each receiver. We consider both the cases of fixed beamforming and when the beamforming design is incorporated into the optimization problem. For fixed beamforming we study three standard beamforming schemes, the zero-forcing (ZF), the regularized zero-forcing (RZF) and the maximum ratio transmission (MRT); a hybrid scheme, MRT-ZF, comprised of a linear combination of MRT and ZF beamforming is also examined. The optimal solution for ZF beamforming is derived in closed-form, while optimization algorithms based on second-order cone programming are developed for MRT, RZF and MRT-ZF beamforming to solve the problem. In addition, the joint-optimization of beamforming and power allocation is studied using semidefinite programming (SDP) with the aid of rank relaxation.

Information and Energy Cooperation in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cooperation between the primary and secondary systems can improve the spectrum efficiency in cognitive radio networks. The key idea is that the secondary system helps to boost the primary systems performance by relaying, and, in return, the primary system provides more opportunities for the secondary system to access the spectrum. In contrast to most of existing works that only consider information cooperation, this paper studies joint information and energy cooperation between the two systems, i.e., the primary transmitter sends information for relaying and feeds the secondary system with energy as well. This is particularly useful when the secondary transmitter has good channel quality to the primary receiver but is energy constrained. We propose and study three schemes that enable this cooperation. First, we assume there exists an ideal backhaul between the two systems for information and energy transfer. We then consider two wireless information and energy transfer schemes from the primary transmitter to the secondary transmitter using power splitting and time splitting energy harvesting techniques, respectively. For each scheme, the optimal and zero-forcing solutions are derived. Simulation results demonstrate promising performance gain for both systems due to the additional energy cooperation. It is also revealed that the power splitting scheme can achieve larger rate region than the time splitting scheme when the efficiency of the energy transfer is sufficiently large.

Distributed Multicell Beamforming With Limited Intercell Coordination

This paper studies distributed optimization schemes for multicell joint beamforming and power allocation in time-division-duplex (TDD) multicell downlink systems where only limited-capacity intercell information exchange is permitted. With an aim to maximize the worst-user signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR), we devise a hierarchical iterative algorithm to optimize downlink beamforming and intercell power allocation jointly in a distributed manner. The proposed scheme is proved to converge to the global optimum. For fast convergence and to reduce the burden of intercell parameter exchange, we further propose to exploit previous iterations adaptively. Results illustrate that the proposed scheme can achieve near-optimal performance even with a few iterations, hence providing a good tradeoff between performance and backhaul consumption. The performance under quantized parameter exchange is also examined.

Robust Collaborative-Relay Beamforming

Relay communications is a promising technique to extend the range of wireless communications by forwarding the message from the sender to the intended destination. While fixed or variable-power relays have been previously investigated, this paper addresses the collaborative use of variable-phase variable-power amplify-and-forward (AF) relays for robust beamforming, with the aid of imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the sender. In particular, the maximization of the worst-case signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination terminal is studied under a bounded spherical region for the norm of the CSI error vector from the relays to the destination. Our main contribution is that we prove, under a condition on the quality of the estimated CSI, the robust-optimal collaborative-relay beamforming (CRBF) can be obtained by S-procedure and rank relaxation techniques. In addition, a distributed algorithm is developed by examining the structure of the optimal CRBF solution. Results demonstrate a significant gain of CRBF over non-robust approaches.