Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Near-Field Communications

A near-field simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) network is investigated, where the hybrid beamforming architecture is employed at the base station (BS) for information transmission while charging the energy harvesting users. A transmit power minimization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the analog beamformer, the baseband digital information/energy beamformers, and the number of dedicated energy beams. To tackle the uncertain number of dedicated energy beams, a semidefinite relaxation-based rank-one solution construction method is proposed to obtain the optimal baseband digital beamformers under the fixed analog precoder. Based on the structure of the optimal baseband digital beamformers, it is proved that no dedicated energy beam is required in the near-field SWIPT. To further exploit this insight, a penalty-based two-layer (PTL) algorithm is proposed to optimize the analog beamformer and baseband digital information beamformers. By employing the block coordinate descent method, the optimal analog beamformer, and baseband digital information beamformers are obtained in the closed-form expressions. Moreover, to reduce the high computational complexity caused by the large number of antennas, a low-complexity two-stage algorithm is proposed. Numerical results illustrate that: 1) the proposed PTL algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance and 2) in contrast to the far-field SWIPT, a single near-field beamformer can focus the energy on multiple locations.