Successive Convex Approximation for Transmit Power Minimization in SWIPT-Multicast Systems

We propose a novel technique for total transmit power minimization and optimal precoder design in wireless multi-group (MG) multicasting (MC) systems. The considered framework consists of three different systems capable of handling heterogeneous user types viz., information decoding (ID) specific users with conventional receiver architectures, energy harvesting (EH) only users with non-linear EH module, and users with joint ID and EH capabilities having separate units for the two operations, respectively. Each user is categorized under unique group(s), which can be of MC type specifically meant for ID users, and/or an energy group consisting of EH explicit users. The joint ID and EH users are a part of the (last) EH group as well as any one of the MC groups distinctly. In this regard, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power with optimal precoder designs for the three aforementioned scenarios, under constraints on minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and harvested energy by the users with respective demands. The problem may be adapted to the well-known semi-definite program, which can be typically solved via relaxation of rank-1 constraint. However, the relaxation of this constraint may in some cases lead to performance degradation, which increases with the rank of the solution obtained from the relaxed problem. Hence, we develop a novel technique motivated by the feasible-point pursuit and successive convex approximation method in order to address the rank-related issue. The benefits of the proposed method are illustrated under various operating conditions and parameter values, with comparison between the three above-mentioned scenarios.