Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer for MIMO Amplify-and-Forward Relay Systems

In this paper, we investigate two-hop Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relay communication systems with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) at the multi-antenna energy harvesting relay. We derive the optimal source and relay covariance matrices to characterize the achievable region between the source-destination rate and the harvested energy at the relay, namely Rate-Energy (R-E) region. In this context, we consider the ideal scenario where the energy harvester (EH) receiver and the information decoder (ID) receiver at the relay can simultaneously decode the information and harvest the energy at the relay. This scheme provides an outer bound for the achievable R-E region since practical energy harvesting circuits are not yet able to harvest the energy and decode the information simultaneously. Then, we consider more practical schemes which are the power splitting (PS) and the time switching (TS) proposed in [1] and which separate the EH and ID transfer over the power domain and the time domain, respectively. In our study, we derive the boundary of the achievable R-E region and we show the effect of the source transmit power, the relay transmit power and the position of the relay between the source and the destination on the achievable R-E region for the ideal scenario and the two practical schemes.