Unary Coding Controlled Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) signals have been relied upon for both wireless information delivery and wireless charging to the massively deployed low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Extensive efforts have been invested in physical layer and medium-access-control layer design for coordinating simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in RF bands. Different from the existing works, we study the coding controlled SWIPT from the information theoretical perspective with practical transceiver. Due to its practical decoding implementation and its flexibility on the codeword structure, unary code is chosen for joint information and energy encoding. Wireless power transfer (WPT) performance in terms of energy harvested per binary sign and of battery overflow/underflow probability is maximised by optimising the codeword distribution of coded information source, while satisfying required wireless information transfer (WIT) performance in terms of mutual information. Furthermore, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) aided coding design is proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Numerical results characterise the SWIPT performance and validate the optimality of our proposed GA aided unary coding design.