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

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.