Design of a Multi-User Wireless Powered Communication System Employing Either Active IRS or AF Relay

In this paper, we optimize a Wireless Powered Communication (WPC) system including multiple pair of users, where transmitters employ single-antenna to transmit their information and power to their receivers with the help of one multiple-antennas Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relay or an active Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS). We propose a joint Time Switching (TS) scheme in which transmitters, receivers, and the relay/IRS are either in their energy or information transmission/reception modes. The transmitted multi-carrier unmodulated and modulated waveforms are used for Energy Harvesting (EH) and Information Decoding (ID) modes, respectively. In order to design an optimal fair system, we maximize the minimum rate of all pairs for both relay and IRS systems through a unified framework. This framework allows us to simultaneously design energy waveforms, find optimal relay/IRS amplification/reflection matrices, allocate powers for information waveforms, and allocate time durations for various phases. In addition, we take into account the non-linearity of the EH circuits in our problem. This problem turns out to be non-convex. Thus, we propose an iterative algorithm by using the Minorization-Maximization (MM) technique, which quickly converges to the optimal solution. Numerical examples show that the proposed method improves the performance of the multi-pair WPC relay/IRS system under various setups.