Pricing Perspective for SWIPT in OFDM-based Multi-User Wireless Cooperative Systems

We propose a novel formulation for joint maximization of total weighted sum-spectral efficiency and weighted sum-harvested energy to study Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) from a pricing perspective. Specifically, we consider that a transmit source communicates with multiple destinations using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system within a dual-hop relay-assisted network, where the destination nodes are capable of jointly decoding information and harvesting energy from the same radio-frequency (RF) signal using either the time-switching (TS) or power-splitting (PS) based SWIPT receiver architectures. Computation of the optimal solution for the aforementioned problem is an extremely challenging task as joint optimization of several network resources introduce intractability at high numeric values of relays, destination nodes and OFDM sub-carriers. Therefore, we present a suitable algorithm with sub-optimal results and good performance to compute the performance of joint data processing and harvesting energy under fixed pricing methods by adjusting the respective weight factors, motivated by practical statistics. Furthermore, by exploiting the binary options of the weights, we show that the proposed formulation can be regulated purely as a sum-spectral efficiency maximization or solely as a sum-harvested energy maximization problem. Numerical results illustrate the benefits of the proposed design under several operating conditions and parameter values.