Resource Allocation for Energy Efficiency in OFDMA-Enabled WPCN

This letter considers a wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where an energy-constrained device directly uses harvested energy from a power transfer source to transmit independent signals to multiple Internet of Things (IoT) users using orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). Our goal is to maximize the system energy efficiency (EE) by jointly optimizing the duration of energy harvesting (EH), subcarrier and power allocation. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem due to the presence of binary assignment variables, and thus it is very challenging to solve it directly. By leveraging Dinkelbach method, a very efficient iterative algorithm with closed-form solutions in each iteration is developed, where its convergence is guaranteed. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm obtains a fast convergence and outperforms baseline algorithms. Notably, they also reveal that the power source should transmit its maximum allowable power to obtain the optimal EE performance.