Optimal beamforming and duration/power allocation for cooperative PB-enabled WPCN

This paper studies the spectrum efficiency (SE) maximization problem for cooperative multi-antenna power beacon (PB)-enabled wireless powered communication networks (WPCN), where each transmitter harvests energy from surrounding PBs and then transmits data to the corresponding receiver within its allocated duration. The considered problem is formulated as jointly optimizing the energy beamforming vectors of PBs, the transmission duration, and the transmit power of users to maximize the total SE. In order to derive an efficient algorithm, the SE maximization problem is decomposed into two subproblems: the SE maximization problem for data transmission and the energy consumption minimization problem for energy transfer.We prove that the optimal SE is concave with the harvested energy of each user, and based on this concavity, an efficient algorithm is proposed to achieve the optimal solution. Finally, simulation results validate the optimality of the proposed algorithm, and verify the superiority of the proposed scheme-more than 150% performance gain is obtained, compared with the scheme of single PB with single antenna.