Abstract
Energy harvesting (EH), which refers to replenishing energy from the environment, is demonstrated to be a promising approach in reducing the operational expenses (OPEX) and increasing the network lifetime of emerging wireless communication technologies by eliminating the need for frequent battery replacing or recharging of wireless devices. Among various ambient energy sources, the focus of this dissertation is on wireless power transfer (WPT) considering the unique characteristic of radio frequency (RF) signals; that is, they inherently carry both information and energy. A particularly interesting scenario arises when sources support simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to provide a remote, controllable, and on-demand energy source. In this context, one of the promising deployment approaches is SWIPT-enabled cognitive radio networks (CRNs), which offer significant gains in terms of spectral and energy efficiencies. One of the practical scenarios of RF-powered CRN is deploying a number of distributed cognitive sensor nodes, equipped with RF EH modules, to sense a specific area and send the sensed data to an access point while coexisting with a primary licensed network. However, exploiting the full potentials of SWIPT-enabled CRNs is subject to carefully aligning the requirements of the EH unlicensed secondary receivers (SRs) with those of the legitimate primary receivers (PRs). In light of this, the first contribution of this thesis focuses on investigating the problem of beamforming for the downlink of multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) CRNs. With the objective of minimising the transmission power of the secondary base station (SBS), optimal and suboptimal solutions for the formulated optimisation problem are provided by jointly optimising the transmit beamforming vector at the SBS and adjusting the parameters of the energy harvesters at the SRs. It is shown that the obtained solutions are efficient in meeting the EH and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the SRs and the levels of interference accepted by the PRs. Apart from SWIPT-enabled CRNs, relay-assisted SWIPT networks are envisioned to be a promising framework offering extended coverage, diversity gains, and enhanced energy efficiency. In this case, the relay network itself can benefit from the relayed transmissions in terms of saving energy, and the harvested energy can be used to charge relay nodes and extend their lifetime as compensation for their role of data forwarding. Nonetheless, a concrete performance analysis on the impact of the involved system parameters such as, the energy conversion efficiency and the location of the EH relay terminal, on the trade-off between the achievable information transfer efficiency and the harvested energy level is crucial for the successful implementation of SWIPT in this context. This inspired the research work in the next two contributions with the main focus on developing novel comprehensive analytical frameworks for the investigation and evaluation of SWIPT relaying systems. Specifically, the second contribution is dedicated to examining the application of noncoherent modulation, which is recognised as an energy efficient modulation scheme for SWIPT, due to its ability to eliminate the need of instantaneous channel state information (CSI) estimation/tracking. Through adopting a moments-based approach, novel expressions are derived for the outage probability, achievable throughput, and average symbol error rate (ASER) of dual-hop SWIPT relaying systems. Furthermore, new asymptotic analytical results are derived for the high SNR regime and are then utilised to analytically quantify the achievable diversity order. The proposed mathematical tools are demonstrated to be an accurate and efficient means by which one can conduct a thorough analysis on the system performance without the burden of Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, the third contribution focuses on SWIPT relaying systems operating in the presence of impulsive non-Gaussian noise, which is typical in several practical scenarios. Several studies show sufficient evidences that impulse man-made noise is encountered in various metropolitan, indoor, and underwater wireless applications. Examples of these sources include automotive ignition, electronic devices, household appliances, medical equipment, and industrial equipment. To characterise the behavior of the system performance under this type of noise, an efficient analytical framework is developed where novel closed-form xpressions for the pairwise error probability (PEP) are derived for two relaying schemes, namely, blind relaying and CSI-assisted relaying, employed under two assumptions imposed on the deployed EH process; namely, instantaneous EH (IEH) and average EH (AEH). Apart from being accurate, the derived expressions are shown to be efficient in quantifying the diversity order of the system and providing a comprehensive study on the impact of the severity of impulsive noise on the behavior of the system.