Optimum Wirelessly Powered Relaying

This letter maximizes the achievable throughput of a relay-assisted wirelessly powered communications system, where an energy constrained source, assisted by an energy constrained relay and both powered by a dedicated power beacon (PB), communicates with a destination. Considering the time splitting approach, the source and relay first harvest energy from the PB, which is equipped with multiple antennas, and then transmits the information to destination. Simple closed-form expressions are derived for the optimal PB energy beamforming vector and time split for energy harvesting and information transmission. Numerical results and simulations demonstrate the superior performance compared with some intuitive benchmark beamforming scheme. Also, it is found that placing the relay at the middle of the source-destination path is no longer optimal.