Joint Iterative Interference Alignment and Energy Harvesting for Multi-User Networks

In a wireless network with multiple users, interferences cause performance degradation as well as provide extra opportunities for harvesting RF energies. In this work, a new joint design of interference alignment (IA) and energy harvesting (EH) that aims to reduce interferences to the desired user and harvest energies from the interferences when IA is inefficient is studied. Two iterative IA schemes, distributed IA (DIA) and IA via alternating minimization (IAAM) are considered. Based on a tradeoff decision criterion, the operation switches between IA and EH. Numerical results show that there is a tradeoff between information rate and harvested energy for both DIA and IAAM. The scheme with higher information rate often has smaller harvested energy.