Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer for Two-hop OFDM Relay System

This paper investigates the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) for twohop orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) decode-and-forward (DF) relay communication system, where a relay harvests energy from radio frequency signals transmitted by the source and then uses the harvested energy to assist the information transmission from the source to its destination. The power splitting receiver is considered at the relay, which splits the received signal into two power streams to perform information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) respectively. For better understanding the behavior and exploring the performance limit of such a system, resource allocation is studied to maximize the total achievable transmission rate. An optimization problem, which jointly takes into account the power allocation, the subcarrier pairing and the power splitting, is formulated. Due to its non-convexity, a resource allocation policy with low complexity based on separation principle is designed. Simulation results show that the system performance can be significantly improved by using our proposed policy. Moreover, the system performance behavior to the relay position is also discussed, and results show that in the two-hop OFDM system with EH relay, the relay should be deployed near the source, while in that with conventional non-EH relay, it should be deployed at the middle between the source and the destination.