Performance Tradeoff Analysis of Hybrid Signaling SWIPT Systems with Nonlinear Power Amplifiers

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is a promising technology to achieve wide-area energy transfer by sharing the same radio frequency (RF) signal and infrastructure of legacy wireless communication systems. To enlarge the effective range of energy transfer in practice, it is desirable to have a hybrid signaling SWIPT scheme, which combines a high-power multitone energy signal with a low-power broadband information signal. This paper presents a systematic study on the performance of hybrid signaling SWIPT systems with memoryless nonlinear transmitter power amplifiers (PAs). Using PA efficiency and signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) as the metrics to measure the efficiency of energy transfer and information transmission, respectively, we derive the tradeoff between these two metrics for two PA classes, two nonlinear PA models, and two SNDR definitions. Our results reveal insights into the fundamental performance tradeoff inherent in SWIPT systems using hybrid signaling schemes.