Massive MIMO Empowered Wireless Powered Sensor Networks: An Optimal Design With Statistical CSI

Wireless energy transfer (WET) has been anticipated as a viable solution to combat the challenges of scarce energy supply in Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. To reap the benefit brought by large scale antenna arrays, massive multiple-input-multiple-out (MIMO) empowered wireless powered sensor networks (WPSNs) is investigated in this letter to meet the urgent demand for reliable and self-sustainable IoT applications. Considering a large-scale antenna array deployed at the access point for energy transfer to and information collection from the multiple-antenna wireless powered sensors, the hardening property in energy transfer is generalized and theoretically proved based on random matrix theory. Based on the hardening properties, the harvesting energy and the uplink sum-rate for sensor data collection are found to be asymptotically deterministic and depend on the statistical channel state information (CSI) only. The hardening properties in both energy and information transfers enable a novel optimal design on the WPSNs based on statistical CSI only. Particularly, the designs of the downlink energy beamforming and multiple uplink information beamforming can be decoupled, and global optimal solutions for the beamforming and time allocation to maximize the uplink sum-rate given downlink power constraint are found in semi-closed forms. Different from prior WPSNs designs, statistical CSI but not instantaneous CSI is exploited and frequent channel estimation and heavy communication overhead can be avoided with a much lower computation complexity, thus improving the practicability and sustainability of the WPSNs. The effectiveness of the proposed design is finally demonstrated by numerical simulations.