Robust transmit designs for an energy harvesting multicast system

Recently, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has received considerable attention. In this paper, we consider a multicast SWIPT system, where a multi-antenna transmitter broadcasts common information to a group of single-antenna information receivers (IRs) and at the same time provides certain amount of energy transfer to a group of single-antenna energy receivers (ERs). Assuming imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, two transmit schemes are proposed to maximize the IRs´ outage-constrained multicast rate subject to a minimum provision of average energy transfer to ERs. In the first transmit scheme, we consider transmit beamforming and develop a safe approximation approach to obtain a conservative beamforming solution for maximizing the outage-constrained multicast rate. To further improve the performance of transmit beamforming, in the second transmit scheme, we consider a stochastic beamforming (SBF) approach, which allows the beamformer to randomly change over time according to some prescribed distribution. By doing so, the SBF scheme is able to fully exploit the temporal degree of freedom to achieve more balanced outage-constrained achievable rates among IRs. Simulation results demonstrated that the SBF scheme is generally better than the transmit beamforming scheme.