Learning to Communicate and Energize: Modulation, Coding, and Multiple Access Designs for Wireless Information-Power Transmission

The explosion of the number of low-power devices in the next decades calls for a re-thinking of wireless network design, namely, unifying wireless transmission of information and power so as to make the best use of the RF spectrum, radiation, and infrastructure for the dual purpose of communicating and energizing. This article provides a novel learning-based approach towards such wireless network design. To that end, a parametric model of a practical energy harvester, accounting for various sources of nonlinearities, is proposed using a nonlinear regression algorithm applied over collected real data. Relying on the proposed model, the learning problem of modulation design for Simultaneous Wireless Information-Power Transmission (SWIPT) over a point-to-point link is studied. Joint optimization of the transmitter and the receiver is implemented using Neural Network (NN)-based autoencoders. The results reveal that by increasing the receiver power demand, the baseband transmit modulation constellation converges to an On-Off keying signalling. Utilizing the observations obtained via learning, an algorithmic SWIPT modulation design is proposed. It is observed via numerical results that the performance loss of the proposed modulations are negligible compared to the ones obtained from learning. Extension of the studied problem to learning modulation design for multi-user SWIPT scenarios and coded modulation design for point-to-point SWIPT are considered. The major conclusion of this work is to utilize learning-based results to design non learning-based algorithms, which perform as well. In particular, inspired by the results obtained via learning, an algorithmic approach for coded modulation design is proposed, which performs very close to its learning counterparts, and is significantly superior due to its high real-time adaptability to new system design parameters.