Nonlinear Energy Harvesting for Millimeter Wave Networks With Large-Scale Antennas

Abstract

In this paper, an analytical framework is proposed to explore the potential of wireless power transfer (WPT) for a millimeter wave (mmWave) network with large-scale antennas. Prior works mostly focus on WPT systems with a linear energy harvesting (EH) model, which cannot properly capture the power dependent EH efficiency. On the other hand, based on a nonlinear EH model, the effect of practical EH circuit specifications on the EH performance can be analyzed. By using stochastic geometry approach, analytical and asymptotic expressions for the energy coverage probability, average harvested energy, and achievable rate are derived under different base station (BS) configuration and deployment scenarios. Numerical results provide interesting design insights that the EH circuit specifications significantly affect the network performance. Increasing the BS density and number of BS antennas can improve the network performance. Due to saturation of EH circuits, the typical receiver can only achieve finite maximum amount of harvested energy and achievable rate even when the BS has a large number of antennas.