Energy-Efficient Port Selection and Beamforming Design for Integrated Data and Energy Transfer Assisted by Fluid Antennas

TL;DR

The paper tackles energy-efficient integration of data and energy transfer using fluid antennas, explicitly modeling port-switching delay and movement energy. It develops a two-tier optimization framework: a fast short-term AO method (Dinkelbach, FPP-SCA, SDR) for per-frame WET efficiency and a long-term DRL approach (Constrained Soft Actor-Critic) to maximize average WET efficiency under long-run throughput and energy constraints. Results show that FA-enabled IDET with movement-aware optimization yields superior short- and long-term WET performance while preserving DR throughput, and that the DRL policy converges within practical training horizons. The work demonstrates the practical viability of FA-based IDET for sustainable IoT deployments, with tractable training overhead amortized over device lifetimes.

Abstract

Integrated data and energy transfer (IDET) is considered as a key enabler of 6G, as it can provide both wireless energy transfer (WET) and wireless data transfer (WDT) services towards low power devices. Thanks to the extra degree of freedom provided by fluid antenna (FA), incorporating FA into IDET systems presents a promising approach to enhance energy efficiency performance. This paper investigates a FA assisted IDET system, where the transmitter is equipped with multiple FAs and transmits wireless signals to the data receiver (DR) and the energy receiver (ER), which are both equipped with a single traditional antenna. The switching delay and energy consumption induced by port selection are taken into account in IDET system for the first time. We aim to obtain the optimal beamforming vector and the port selection strategy at the transmitter, in order to maximize the short-term and long-term WET efficiency, respectively. The instant sub-optimal solution is obtained by alternatively optimizing the beamforming vector and port selection in each transmission frame, while a novel constrained soft actor critic (C-SAC) algorithm is proposed to find the feasible policy of port selection from the long-term perspective. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme is able to achieve greater gain in terms of both the short-term and long-term WET efficiency compared to other benchmarks, while not degrading WDT performance.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: System model.
• Figure 2: The framework of C-SAC algorithm
• Figure 3: WET efficiency versus transmission throughput requirement at DR with different number of FAs $N_t$.
• Figure 4: WET efficiency versus transmission throughput requirement at DR with different average velocity $u$ of droplet.
• Figure 5: Average WET efficiency versus port number $N$ with different scaling antenna constant $W$.