Energy Efficiency of Distributed Antenna Systems with Wireless Power Transfer

In this paper, we study energy-efficient resource allocation in distributed antenna system (DAS) with wireless power transfer, where time-division multiple access (TDMA) is adopted for downlink multiuser information transmission. In particular, when a user is scheduled to receive information, other users harvest energy at the same time using the same radio-frequency (RF) signal. We consider two types of energy efficiency (EE) metrics: user-centric EE (UC-EE) and network-centric EE (NC-EE). Our goal is to maximize the UC-EE and NC-EE, respectively, by optimizing the transmission time and power subject to the energy harvesting requirements of the users. For both UC-EE and NC-EE maximization problems, we transform the nonconvex problems into equivalently tractable problems by using suitable mathematical tools and then develop iterative algorithms to find the globally optimal solutions. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods compared with the benchmark schemes.