Energy Efficiency Maximization in IRS-enabled Phase Cooperative PS-SWIPT based Self-sustainable IoT Network

Power splitting based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (PS-SWIPT) appears to be a promising solution to support future self-sustainable Internet of Things (SS-IoT) networks. However, the performance of these networks is constrained by radio frequency signal strength and channel impairments. To address this challenge, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are introduced in PS-SWIPT based SS-IoT networks to improve network efficiency by controlling signal reflections. In this article, an IRS-enabled phase cooperative framework is proposed to improve energy efficiency (EE) of the IoT network $({\mathtt {I}}^{net})$ using phase shifts of the user network $({\mathtt {U}^{net})}$, without constraining hardware resources at ${\mathtt {U}^{net}}$. We exploit transmit beamforming (BF) at access points (APs) and phase shifts optimization at the IRS end with phase effective cooperation between APs to enhance ${\mathtt {I}}^{net}$ EE performance. The maximization problem turns out to be NP-hard, so first, an alternating optimization (AO) is solved for the ${\mathtt {U}^{net}}$ using low computational complexity heuristic BF approaches, namely, transmit minimum-mean-square-error and zero-forcing BF, and phase optimization is performed using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approach. To combat the computational complexity of AO, we also propose an alternative solution by exploiting heuristic BF schemes and an iterative algorithm, i.e., the element-wise block-coordinate descent method for phase shifts optimization. Next, EE maximization is solved for the ${\mathtt {I}^{net}}$ by optimizing the PS ratio and active BF vectors by exploiting optimal phase shifts of the ${\mathtt {U}}^{net}$. Simulation results confirm that employing IRS phase cooperation in PS-SWIPT based SS-IoT networks can significantly improve EE performance of ${\mathtt {I}^{net}}$ without constraining resources.