Full Duplex and Wireless-Powered Communications

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is an attractive energy-efficient technology that has been identified as a potential enabler for the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Recently, there is an increasing interest in combining full duplex (FD) and WET to achieve greater system performance, and in this chapter we overview the main characteristics of the wireless-powered communication networks (WPCNs), the approaches for modeling the energy-harvesting (EH) conversion process, and the main FD architectures, namely (1) FD bidirectional communications, (2) FD relay communications, and (3) FD hybrid access point (AP), along with their particularities. We also discuss two example setups related with architectures (1) and (3), while demonstrating the suitable regions for FD operation in each case. For the former we demonstrate the gains in energy efficiency (EE) when the base station (BS) operates with FD for self-energy (SEg) recycling, while for the latter we show that the linear EH model is optimistic and that the FD design is not only simpler than half duplex’s (HD) but it also can offer significant performance gains in terms of system reliability when the successive interference cancellation (SIC) hardware performs not too bad. Finally, some possible research directions for the design and deployment of FD wireless-powered systems are identified.