A Novel Temperature-based Model for SWIPT

Abstract: In this letter, a novel communication paradigm for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is proposed, which leverages the thermal characteristics of electromagnetic signals. In particular, the proposed scheme exploits the inherent thermal dynamics of electromagnetic signals, enabling the seamless integration of information decoding and energy harvesting (EH). As a consequence, in contrast to conventional SWIPT techniques, the proposed model eliminates the need to divide the received signal into orthogonal components. By exploiting the thermal correlation between consecutive time slots, the communication channel is converted to a virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with memory. We evaluate the achievable rate of the proposed temperature-modulated channel for uniform and exponential input distributions and assess its performance in terms of harvested energy through a non-linear harvesting model. Our numerical results reveal that the exponential distribution outperforms the uniform distribution in rate and harvested energy at low input power levels, while the uniform distribution achieves a better EH performance at high input power levels.