Supporting legacy and RF-energy harvesting devices in multi-cells OFDMA networks

A multi-cell network that uses orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) is studied here. Unlike prior works, the proposed network consists of both (i) legacy data users that do not have energy harvesting capability and have a minimum data rate requirement and (ii) radio frequency (RF)-energy harvesting devices with a minimum energy requirement. It studies sub-band allocation to users and transmits power allocation at base stations. The authors formulate a mixed-integer non-linear program and also present two heuristics to assign sub-band to base stations. Numerical results show that RF energy harvesting devices will not affect network capacity if legacy data users require a high data rate. In addition, the results obtained from the two proposed heuristics are ∼ 95% of the optimal solution.