Low-Complexity Null-Space-Based Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer Scheme

Abstract

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has attracted sustained interest. We propose a null-space-based transmission scheme for multiuser SWIPT serving both energy users (EUs) and information users (IUs). Under a practical nonlinear energy-harvesting (EH) model and multiple waveform options, we revisit the role of dedicated energy beams (EBs). We show that, in general, dedicated EBs are unnecessary because information beams (IBs) with Gaussian signaling can simultaneously support wireless energy transfer (WET) and wireless information transfer (WIT), unless special energy-centric waveforms (e.g., deterministic sinusoidal waveforms) are employed and provide sufficient gains. Guided by these insights, we formulate an optimization problem for EB design to enable dedicated waveform transmission for WET, and we develop a low-complexity algorithm that reduces computation by ignoring the WET contribution of IBs during optimization. Numerical results corroborate that deterministic sinusoidal waveforms outperform Gaussian signaling when the received RF power lies in the EH high-efficiency region, making dedicated EBs beneficial. The proposed scheme achieves computational complexity reductions of 91.43\% and 98.54\% for the cases $M=8,,K^I=K^E=2$ and $M=16,,K^I=K^E=4$, respectively, with negligible performance loss, thereby validating the efficiency of the low-complexity algorithm.