Training-Free Energy Beamforming Assisted by Wireless Sensing

Abstract: This paper studies the transmit energy beamforming in a multi-antenna wireless power transfer (WPT) system, in which an access point (AP) equipped with a uniform linear array (ULA) sends radio signals to wirelessly charge multiple single-antenna energy receivers (ERs). Different from conventional energy beamforming designs that require the AP to acquire the channel state information (CSI) via training and feedback, we propose a new training-free energy beamforming approach assisted by wireless radar sensing, which is implemented based on the following two-stage protocol. In the first stage, the AP performs wireless radar sensing to estimate the path gain and angle parameters of the ERs for constructing the corresponding CSI. In the second stage, the AP implements the transmit energy beamforming based on the constructed CSI to efficiently charge these ERs in a fair manner. Under this setup, first, we jointly optimize the sensing beamformers and duration in the first stage to minimize the sensing duration, while ensuring a given accuracy threshold for parameters estimation subject to the maximum transmit power constraint at the AP. Next, we optimize the energy beamformers in the second stage to maximize the minimum harvested energy by all ERs. In this approach, the estimation accuracy threshold for the first stage is properly designed to balance the resource allocation between the two stages for optimizing the ultimate energy harvesting performance. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed training-free energy beamforming design performs close to the performance upper bound with perfect CSI, and outperforms the benchmark schemes without such joint optimization and that with isotropic transmission.