Joint Beamforming Design and Time Allocation for Wireless Powered Communication Networks

Abstract: This paper investigates a multi-input single-output (MISO) wireless powered communication network (WPCN) under the protocol of harvest-then-transmit. The power station (PS) with reliable power supply can replenish the passive user nodes by wireless power transfer (WPT) in the downlink (DL), then each user node transmits independent information to the sink by a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme in the uplink (UL). We consider the joint time allocation and beamforming design to maximize the system sum-throughput. The semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique is applied to solve the nonconvex design problem. The tightness of SDR approximation, thus the global optimality, is proved. This implies that only one single energy beamformer is required at the PS. Then a fast semiclosed form solution is proposed by exploiting the inherent structure. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms from the perspectives of time complexity and information throughput.