Beamforming in Wireless Energy Harvesting Communications Systems: A Survey

Wireless energy harvesting (EH) is a promising solution to prolong lifetime of power-constrained networks such as military and sensor networks. The high sensitivity of energy transfer to signal decay due to path loss and fading, promotes multi-antenna techniques like beamforming as the candidate transmission scheme for EH networks. Exploiting beamforming in EH networks has gained overwhelming interest, and lot of literature has appeared recently regarding this topic. The objective of this paper is to point out the state-of-the-art research activity on beamforming implementation in EH wireless networks. We first review the basic concepts and architecture of EH wireless networks. In addition, we also discuss the effects of beamforming transmission scheme on system performance in EH wireless communication. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive survey of multi-antenna EH communications. We cover the supporting network architectures like broadcasting, relay, and cognitive radio networks with the various beamforming deployment within the network architecture. We classify the different beamforming approaches in each network topology according to its design objective such as increasing the throughput, enhancing the energy transfer efficiency, and minimizing the total transmit power, with paying special attention to exploiting the physical layer security. We also survey major advances as well as open issues, challenges, and future research directions in multi-antenna EH communications.