Superposition of rectangular power pulses and CP-OFDM signal for SWIPT

Abstract

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has recently attracted researchers and may help to satisfy future technology demands. SWIPT allows wireless power transfer (WPT) and wireless information transfer (WIT) to coexist based on shared resources. Recent studies have shown that, due to the nonlinearity of the rectifiers, high-PAPR (peak to average power ratio) waveforms provide better performance in terms of energy harvesting, making the design of power signals essential. In addition, these power signals should consume the smallest amount of resources for the WIT. In this paper, a new waveform design is proposed where the information and power signals are superposed using the same frequency and time resources. The power signal is composed of a high peak modulated rectangular wave sent during the cyclic prefix of the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) system, which is discarded at the information receiver, such that it does not interfere with the OFDM data symbol. Although the pulse is restricted to be within the cyclic prefix, there might be a small amount of interference caused by channel dispersion. Simulations and measurements show that a good choice of signal parameters can minimize interference on the information symbols and simultaneously provide good performance in terms of energy harvesting.