QoS-Constrained Transceiver Design and
Power Splitting for Downlink Multiuser MIMO
SWIPT Systems
Anming Dong
∗
, Haixia Zhang
∗
, Dalei Wu
†
and Dongfeng Yuan
∗
∗
Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Wireless Communication Technologies
Shandong University, Jinan, China, 250100
donganming@gmail.com, {haixia.zhang, dfyuan}@sdu.edu.cn
†
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, TN, USA, 37403
dalei-wu@utc.edu
Abstract—This paper studies the joint transceiver design and
power splitting (PS) for a downlink multiuser multiple-input
multiple-output (MU-MIMO) simultaneous wireless information
and power transfer (SWIPT) system. The objective of this work is
to minimize transmit power by jointly optimizing the transmitter
at a base station (BS), the PS factors and information decoding
(ID) receivers at mobile stations (MSs) subject to both the mean-
square-error (MSE) and energy harvesting (EH) constraints.
To solve the formulated nonconvex optimization problem, a
framework is proposed to iteratively solve a joint transmitter
and PS factors optimization (JTxPS) sub-problem and a receiver
side minimum mean-square error (MMSE) minimization sub-
problem. The nonconvex JTxPS sub-problem is reformulated
as a convex semidefinite programming (SDP) and thus solved.
Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Index Terms—Energy harvesting; transceiver design; simul-
taneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT);
interference channel; mean-squared error (MSE); semidefinite
programming (SDP).
I. INTRODUCTION
To cater for the ever increasing demand of green commu-
nications, energy efficient design of wireless communication
systems has received increasing attentions from both industry
and academia [1], [2]. Recently, simultaneous wireless infor-
mation and power transfer (SWIPT) has broken new ground
in areas of energy efficient design. The founder work [3] and
[4] characterized the fundamental limits on rate and energy
of point-to-point SWIPT systems from the perspective of
information theory. To make SWIPT practical, there has been
significant interest in constructing practical SWIPT transmis-
sion schemes and protocols [5]–[9]. Power splitting (PS) is one
of the methods that achieve SWIPT by dividing the received
signal at the receive antennas into two parts for information
retrieval and energy storage, respectively and simultaneously.
With that methods, it is possible to achieve SWIPT by jointly
optimizing the transceivers for information decoding (ID)
and PS factors for energy harvesting (EH). Consequently,
transceiver design and power splitting for SWIPT systems have
received considerable attentions.
The prior work on transceiver design and PS for a variety
of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scenarios can be
found in literature [9]–[17]. In [9], the concept of PS was
first proposed for a point-to-point MIMO system. In work
[10], joint transmit beamforming and PS optimization was
first investigated to minimize the transmit power under signal-
to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) and EH quality of ser-
vice (QoS) constraints for a multiuser multiple-input single-
output (MISO) system. A semidefinite programming (SDP)
relaxation technique was developed to obtain the globally
optimal solution. Paper [11] further proposed a second order
cone programming (SOCP) relaxation solution, which can
decrease the computational complexity significantly compared
with the SDP scheme. Recently, robust counterparts of this
problem have been proposed in [12] and [13] to counter
channel imperfection. To release the overhead for information
exchange, distributed design scheme was proposed in [11].
For interference channel (IC) networks, the work in [14]
considered joint optimization of beamforming and power al-
location to minimize the transmit power for a PS-based MISO
system with both the SINR and EH QoS constrains. The SDP
and SOCP based solutions were derived for the considered
problem. The research in [15] and [16] investigated more
general MIMO IC networks by combination with interference
alignment. For multi-cell multiuser downlink SWIPT systems,
the work in [17] studied joint transceivers design and PS
scheme to optimize the energy efficiency. Besides the PS-based
schemes, transceiver designs for system with separated ID and
EH receivers can be found in [18]–[22].
All the aforementioned work has taken the information rate
or SINR as design criteria or QoS constraints. As an important
design criterion, MSE-based transceiver designs have also
been investigated in [23]–[25]. The work in [23] studied the
MSE-based transceiver design for a downlink MU MIMO
system with separated EH and ID receivers. Two schemes
were considered in this work. The first design was to minimize
the worst MSE among ID receivers subject to EH constraints.
The second design was proposed to maximize the EH subject
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