Improper Gaussian Signaling for IRS Assisted Multiuser SWIPT Systems with Hardware Impairments

In this article, we focus on intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multiuser simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems with hardware impairments (HWIs), which result from the aggregate effect of in-phase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI), power amplifier non-linearity, quantization distortion, phase noise, etc. Improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) is employed to combat the signal distortion incurred by HWIs and the interference from other users. We aim to maximize the minimum achievable information rate among all users by jointly optimizing the active beamforming vectors, passive reflecting coefficients, and power splitting coefficients, subject to the minimum harvested energy requirements of these users and the total power budget at the transmitter. Due to the intricate coupling between the reflecting coefficients and beamforming vectors, we propose a two-level iterative optimization algorithm to solve this non-convex problem. Based on the above, we also study the weighted rate-energy region maximization problem. Numerical results show that the use of IGS significantly outperforms traditional proper Gaussian signaling (PGS) in the considered systems and also affirm the effectiveness of the proposed optimization algorithm.