Energy Efficiency Optimization Technique for SWIPT-enabled Multi-Group Multicasting Systems with Heterogeneous Users

We consider a multi-group (MG) multicasting (MC) system wherein a multi-antenna transmitter serves heterogeneous users capable of either information decoding (ID) or energy harvesting (EH), or both. In this context, we investigate a precoder design framework to explicitly serve the ID and EH users categorized within certain MC and EH groups. Specifically, the ID users are categorized within multiple MC groups while the EH users are a part of single (last) group. We formulate a problem to optimize the energy efficiency in the considered scenario under a quality-of-service (QoS) constraint. An algorithm based on Dinkelback method, slack-variable replacement, and second-order conic programming (SOCP)/semi-definite relaxation (SDR) is proposed to obtain a suitable solution for the above-mentioned fractional-objective dependent non-convex problem. Simulation results illustrate the benefits of proposed algorithm under several operating conditions and parameter values, while drawing a comparison between the two proposed methods.