Wireless power meets energy harvesting: A joint energy allocation approach

This paper investigates power allocation design for a wireless powered communication system, where one user harvests radio frequency (RF) energy from an energy access point (EAP) that can be used immediately to power its information transmission to a data access point (DAP). The channels from the EAP to the user and from the user to the DAP are assumed to be time-varying over two separate bands but a priori known. Our objective is to maximize the achievable rate at the DAP by jointly optimizing the power allocation at both links, subject to the sum power constraint at the EAP and the energy causality constraint at the user. We study the structural properties of the optimal power allocation, based on which we propose an efficient algorithm to solve the problem. It is shown that by optimizing energy transmission at the EAP, higher rate can be achieved than a conventional energy harvesting system where the user randomly harvests energy from the environment with the same sum power.