Energy Efficiency in RF Energy Harvesting-Powered Distributed Antenna Systems for the Internet of Things

This paper studies a distributed antenna system (DAS) network with radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) technology where the distributed antenna ports (DAPs) transmit energy and information to multiple users simultaneously. The time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol is adopted, so for each time slot is allowed to receive information, while the rest of the users harvest energy. In order to maximize the system energy efficiency (EE), subject to the EH requirements and data rate requirements of the users, the transmission time and power assignment are jointly optimized. In order to deal with this non-convex problem, based on Dinkelbach theory and the block-coordinate descent (BCD) scheme, an efficient algorithm is designed to obtain the global optimal solution. Then, simulation results are presented to show that the proposed method achieves much higher system EE compared with benchmark methods. With the increase of the user’s minimum information rate, the system EE decreases rapidly.