Joint energy and information transmission in a two-user symmetric interference channel

This paper deals with the joint transmission of energy and information in multiuser systems, in particular, in a two-user symmetric interference channel. It is assumed that each receiver can be either in the information decoding (ID) mode, or in the energy harvesting (EH) mode at any time instant. In the ID mode, information-carrying signals from the other transmitter is considered as noise, while energy-carrying signals can be ignored owing to their known structure. In the EH mode, a receiver can harvest energy from the energy-carrying signal transmitted by its own transmitter as well as from the interfering signal from the other transmitter, be it an information or an energy-carrying signal; which is called interference harvesting. The transmission scheme is optimized in order to maximize the throughput while satisfying a constraint on the minimum amount of average harvested power by each receiver, which might model the power required by the receiver for processing and decoding the information-carrying signals. This problem is formulated as a convex optimization problem which can be efficiently solved, and provides insights on the optimal transmission scheme with the help of numerical simulations.