Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for Simultaneous Information and Energy Transfer With Imperfect Channel Estimation

Energy harvesting (EH) from background radio-frequency signals has recently started to be considered as a promising means of mitigating energy deficiencies in wireless sensors that have limited battery power. In this paper, to deal with the problem of energy shortage, we consider EH and energy efficiency, which is the ratio of the amount of data transferred to the energy dissipated within the system, at the same time. We formulate a nonconvex optimization problem for determining the training interval for channel estimation, user scheduling, and power allocation strategies to maximize the energy efficiency and transform the problem into a tractable convex problem. Based on the convexity of the problem, we propose an energy-efficient resource allocation strategy using an iterative method and provide the convergence of the proposed algorithm based on nonlinear fractional programming. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm operates in an energy-efficient way, thereby achieving maximum energy efficiency while ensuring the data rate and harvested energy requirements.