Antenna Clustering for Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer in a MIMO Full-Duplex System: A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Design

Abstract

We propose a novel antenna clustering-based method for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) full-duplex (FD) system. For a point-to-point communication set up, the proposed method enables a wireless device with multiple antennas to simultaneously transmit information and harvest energy using the same time-frequency resources. And the energy transmitting device with multiple antennas simultaneously receives information from the energy harvesting (EH) device. This is achieved by clustering the antennas into two MIMO subsystems: one for information transmission (IT) and another for EH. Furthermore, the self-interference (SI) signal at the EH device caused by the FD mode of operation is harvested by the device. For implementation-friendly antenna clustering and MIMO precoding, we propose two methods: (i) a sub-optimal method based on relaxation of objective function in a combinatorial optimization problem, and (ii) a hybrid deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based method. For the proposed DRL solution, we design a hybrid discrete/continuous action agent that jointly clusters the MIMO antennas between EH and IT, and at the same time, find the best values for MIMO precoding matrices at both devices. This is achieved by using two interacting agent learning subsystems, namely, deep double Q-learning (DDQN), for antenna clustering and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), for MIMO precoding. The effect of imperfect CSI is also studied and investigated. Finally, we study the performances of the two implementation methods and compare them with the conventional time switching-based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique. Our findings show that the proposed MIMO clustering-based SWIPT method gives a significant improvement in spectral efficiency compared to the time switching-based SWIPT method. In particular, the DRL-based method provides the highest spectral efficiency. Besides, the numerical results show that, for the considered system set up, the number of antennas in each device should exceed three to mitigate self-interference to an acceptable level.