Joint Beamforming Design and Power Splitting Optimization in IRS-Assisted SWIPT NOMA Networks

This paper proposes a novel network framework of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, where IRS is used to enhance the NOMA performance and the wireless power transfer (WPT) efficiency of SWIPT. We formulate a problem of minimizing base station (BS) transmit power by jointly optimizing successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding order, BS transmit beamforming vector, power splitting (PS) ratio and IRS phase shift while taking into account the quality-of-service (QoS) requirement and energy harvested threshold of each user. The formulated problem is non-convex optimization problem, which is difficult to solve it directly. Hence, a two-stage algorithm is proposed to solve the above-mentioned problem by applying semidefinite relaxation (SDR), Gaussian randomization and successive convex approximation (SCA). Specifically, after determining SIC decoding order by designing IRS phase shift in the first stage, we alternately optimize BS transmit beamforming vector, PS ratio, and IRS phase shift to minimize the BS transmit power. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed optimization algorithm in reducing BS transmit power compared to other baseline algorithms. Meanwhile, compared with non-IRS-assisted network, the IRS-assisted SWIPT NOMA network can decrease BS transmit power by 51.13%.