Wireless energy harvesting in interference alignment networks

Wireless energy harvesting (WEH) is becoming one of the key techniques in energy harvesting in wireless networks. On the other hand, interference alignment (IA) is a promising solution for interference management in wireless networks. Although plenty of effort has been conducted on WEH and IA, these two important areas have been addressed separately in most of the existing literature. In this article we provide an overview of WEH in IA networks, and present a unified framework to jointly study WEH and IA. To simultaneously optimize both information transmission (IT) and WEH performance in IA networks, we propose a power splitting optimization (PSO) algorithm. In addition, we study the power allocation problem in the proposed PSO algorithm. Simulation results are presented to compare the performance of the proposed schemes for WEH in IA networks. Some interesting research challenges are also presented for the WEH in IA networks.