In-Band Wireless Information and Power Transfer With Lens Antenna Array

Abstract

This letter studies a new wireless information and power transfer coexisting system, where two uncoordinated energy and information sources simultaneously transmit to the same receiver for energy harvesting and information reception, respectively. In such a setup, the information decoder could suffer from severe signal distortion due to the simultaneously received energy signal that is usually orders-of-magnitude stronger than the desired information signal. To tackle this practical issue, we propose a novel lens antenna array-enabled receiver, which exploits the angle-of-arrival-dependent energy focusing capability of lens array for the spatial separation of energy and information signals. In addition, an optimal power splitting-based scheme is proposed by taking into account the signal distortion effect at the receiver, which is applicable for both lens and conventional antenna arrays. Numerical results show that the proposed lens array receiver significantly outperforms that with the conventional uniform planar array in terms of an achievable rate-energy tradeoff.