Interference Alignment Inspired Opportunistic Communications in Multi-Cluster MIMO Networks with Wireless Power Transfer

In this work, we jointly investigate the issues of node scheduling and transceiver design in a sensor network with multiple clusters, which is endowed with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer. In each cluster of the observed network, S out of N nodes are picked, each of which is capable of performing information transmission (IT) via uplink communications. As for the remaining idle nodes, they can harvest energy from radio-frequency signals around their ambient wireless environments. Aiming to boost the intra-cluster performance, we advocate an interference alignment enabled opportunistic communication (IAOC) scheme. This scheme can yield better tradeoffs between IT and wireless power transfer (WPT). With the aid of IAOC scheme, the signal projected onto the direction of the receive combining vector is adopted as the accurate measurement of effective signal strength, and then the high-efficiency scheduling metric for each node can be accordingly obtained. Additionally, an algorithm, based on alternative optimization and dedicated for transceiver design, is also put forward, which is able to promote the achievable sum rate performance as well as the total harvested power. Our simulation results verify the effectiveness of the designed IAOC scheme in terms of improving the performance of IT and WPT in multi-cluster scenarios.