Modulation Design For Wireless Information and POWER TRANSMISION
Modulation Design For Wireless Information and POWER TRANSMISION
Abstract—Far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) and simul- Moreover, most of the existing works in the SWIPT literature
taneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) have are based on the linear model of the energy harvester (EH) [5]-
become increasingly important in radio frequency (RF) and com- [9]. Yet, the linear EH model is limited in terms of accuracy,
munication communities recently. The problem of modulation
design for SWIPT has however been scarcely addressed. In this and systematic waveform design utilizing the nonlinear model
paper, a modulation scheme based on asymmetric phase-shift allows to achieve a higher ECE (and overall end-to-end
keying (PSK) is considered, which improves the SWIPT rate- power transfer efficiency) in a practical rectenna circuit with
energy tradeoff region significantly. The nonlinear rectifier model, the use of multiple sinewaves [10]-[13]. Leveraging [10],
which accurately models the energy harvester, is adopted for eval- SWIPT signal design accounting for the rectifier nonlinearity
uating the output direct current (DC) power at the receiver. The
harvested DC power is maximized under an average power con- was studied in [14]. It was concluded in [14] that the
straint at the transmitter and a constraint on the rate of informa- rectifier nonlinearity radically changes the design of SWIPT.
tion transmitted via a multi-carrier signal over a flat fading chan- Indeed “it favours a different waveform, modulation, input
nel. As a consequence of the rectifier nonlinearity, this work high- distribution and transceiver architecture as well as a different
lights that asymmetric PSK modulation provides benefits over use of the RF spectrum. Exploiting the rectifier nonlinearity
conventional symmetric PSK modulation in SWIPT and opens
the door to systematic modulation design tailored for SWIPT. in the SWIPT design also makes a more efficient use of the
Index Terms—SWIPT, nonlinear model, rectenna, energy har- resources by enabling enlarged rate-energy regions compared
vesting, modulation. to those obtained by ignoring the nonlinearity in the system
design.” Motivated by those observations, the optimal input
I. I NTRODUCTION
distribution of SWIPT subject to nonlinear power constraints
Radio frequency (RF) wireless power transfer (WPT) has was studied in [15]-[16]. Remarkably, it was shown that the
become more important recently with the advent of mainly capacity of an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel
battery free wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things. under transmit average power and nonlinear delivered power
At the same time, new wireless communications systems constraints is the same as the capacity of an AWGN channel
enabling simultaneous wireless information and power transfer under an average power constraint. In other words, the
(SWIPT) are widely investigated in the research community. capacity of an AWGN channel is independent of the value of
With regard to practical modulation schemes, their effect the delivered power constraint. The capacity can be arbitrarily
on the energy conversion efficiency (ECE) as compared to approached by using time sharing between distributions
continuous wave (CW) transmission has been considered by with high amount of information, e.g. circularly symmetric
the RF community [1]-[4]. In [1], FSK modulated signals are complex Gaussian (CSCG) inputs, and distributions with high
shown to be detrimental in terms of harvested power due to the amount of power reminiscent of flash signaling exhibiting a
mixing operation of the diode-based rectifier. In [2], amplitude low probability of high amplitude signals.
and phase variations introduced by QPSK and 16QAM are In this paper, motivated by the above observations, we
demonstrated to decrease the ECE as compared to the CW. design modulation for SWIPT with nonlinear energy harvester
However, it is established in [3] that these modulation schemes based on finite constellations. We study modulation of infor-
can improve the ECE at low input powers. In [4], it is shown mation symbols onto the multi-carrier energy-carrying wave-
that the ECE, achieved via multitone and modulated signals, form, resulting in a unified SWIPT waveform. We adapt PSK
depends on the circuit optimization, mainly on the matching modulation to SWIPT requirements and propose asymmetric
network and the load. Accordingly, such signals can enhance PSK modulation, which allows to gain the maximum output
the ECE for certain load values and input power levels in energy while maintaining the required information rate.
relation to a CW signal with the same average power. Notation: E{·} refers to the DC component of a signal.
However, modulation schemes designed specifically for E{·} refers to the expectation over statistical randomness.
the purpose of SWIPT have scarcely been addressed [5]. V ar{·} refers to the variance of a random variable. U [−a, a]
This work was supported in part by the EPSRC of U.K. under Grants denotes the uniform distribution over the interval [−a, a]. The
EP/K502856/1, EP/L504786/1 and EP/P003885/1. convolution operator is denoted by ∗.
illustrated in Fig. 2 (left), a lossless antenna can be modelled
as a voltage source vs (t) followed by a series resistance Rs
and a parallel reactance Xs . The rectifier is modelled as a
resistance Rin in parallel with a reactance Xin . Assuming
perfect matching (Rin = Rs , Xin = −Xs ), all the available
RF power Pin,av is transferred
to the2rectifier and absorbed by
Fig. 1: System model with the receiver simultaneously decod-
Rin , so that Pin,av = E E |vin
√ (t)| /Rs Since Pin,av =
.
ing information and harvesting energy. E E |y(t)|2 , vin (t) = y(t) Rs .
a single-input single-output (SISO) point-to-point SWIPT is and an ideal low pass filter, such that vout (t) is at a constant
considered and the receiver is assumed to be able to simulta- DC level. Choosing a = E {E {vd (t)}} = −vout , we can write
P∞ P∞ i/2
neously decode information and harvest energy. We consider id (t) = i=0 ki vin (t)i = i=0 ki Rs y(t)i . Truncating the
a multi-carrier/band transmission (with single-carrier being a expansion to order 4, the DC component of id (t) is obtained
special case) consisting of N orthogonal subbands where the as iout ≈ k0 + zDC where
nth subband has carrier frequency fn and equal bandwidth Bs , zDC = k2 Rs E E y(t)2 + k4 Rs2 E E y(t)4
(3)
n = 0, . . . , N − 1. The carrier frequencies are evenly spaced
such that fn = f0 + n∆f with ∆f denoting the inter-carrier with k2 = 0.0034 and k4 = 0.3829 for a typical Schottky
frequency spacing (with Bs ≤ ∆f ). The channel, over which diode with is = 5µA and n = 1.05, and vt = 25.86mV .
the signal is transmitted, is assumed to be flat fading and is The reader is referred to [10],[14] for more details on this EH
subject to AWGN. Throughout the paper, we assume that the model.
effect of noise is negligible for energy harvesting purposes. III. M ODULATION D ESIGN FOR SWIPT
A. Transceiver Design Considering a flat fading channel with gains given as hn = 1
Considering the multi-carrier transmission, the channel in- for n = 1, ..., N , we first study the scaling of the harvested
put at time t is given as power at the receiver with respect to the number of carriers,
(N −1 ) as well as the variation in the phase range of the transmitted
X
j2πfn t
signal. Next, we consider the M PSK modulation design for
x(t) = ℜ Xn e (1) SWIPT purposes and study the achievable information rate
n=0
for the considered M PSK modulation. Finally, we consider
jΦn optimization of the harvested power under an average power
with Xn = Sn e , where Sn and Φn refer to the amplitude
and phase of the nth carrier at frequency fn . The transmitter constraint and a received information rate constraint.
is subject to a transmit power constraint E |Xn |2 ≤ P .
A. Scaling Law for Uniformly Distributed Random Phase
The transmitted signal x(t) propagates through a multipath
channel. The received signal at the receiver is modelled as An analytical expression for zDC in (3) is now derived for
(N −1 ) the multi-carrier signal with uniform
p power allocation across
X
j2πfn t the carriers with Sn = s = 2P/N , n = 0, . . . , N − 1
y(t) = ℜ hn X n e , (2) and the phases of different carrier frequencies chosen to be
n=0
independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) as Φn ∼ U [−δ, δ],
where hn is the channel frequency response at frequency fn . n = 0, . . . , N −1. For a flat fading channel, the received signal
y(t) is given by
B. Antenna Equivalent Circuit Model
r N −1
The antenna model reflects the power transfer from the 2P X
y(t) = cos(2πfn t + Φn ). (4)
antenna to the rectifier through the matching network. As N n=0
The second and fourth order terms in zDC in (3) are sim-
plified by taking the time average and expectation over the
randomness of the signal, resulting in
3k4 Rs2 P 2 X
zDC = k2 Rs P + E {cos (Θ)} , (5)
2N 2 n0 ,n1 ,n2 ,n3
n0 +n1 =n2 +n3
4.5
Φn =0
4 Φn ~ U[-π/12,π/12]
Φn ~ U[-π/6,π/6]
zDC [µA]
3.5
Φn ~ U[-π/4,π/4]
3 Φn ~ U[-π/3,π/3]
Φn ~ U[-π/2,π/2]
2.5
Fig. 4: Rectenna with a single series diode rectifier. Φn ~ U[-π,π]
2
R 1.5
The output entropy H(Y ) = − log2 (pY (y))pY (y)dy is 0 1 2 3 4 5
log 2(N)
computed by using Monte-Carlo or numerical integration
[18], where the output p.d.f. pY (y) is given as pY (y) = (a) zDC obtained numerically (solid lines) and with scaling law (dash
√ 2
PM−1 1 PM−1 −|y− γejφm | lines) as a function of log2 (N ).
m=0 pX (xm )pZ (y − xm ) = π m=0 pm e .
×10 -6
3.5
D. Rate-Energy Region Optimization
Φn = 0
We can now define the achievable rate-energy (or, more 3
Φn ~ U[-π/12,π/12]
∆
accurately, rate-DC current) region as CR−IDC (po X (xm )) =
Φn ~ U[-π/6,π/6]
n 2.5
P DC [W]
PM−1 Φn ~ U[-π/4,π/4]
(R, IDC ) : R ≤ IN , IDC ≤ zDC , m=0 pm = 1 . Φn ~ U[-π/3,π/3]
In order to identify the rate-energy region, we formulate 2 Φn ~ U[-π/2,π/2]
2.2
δ=π/4
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δ=π/3
δ=π/2
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