This paper applies the wireless powered communication network (WPCN) to an indoor communication system with two energy harvesting (EH) enabled users. Unlike the existing WPCN works designed for outdoor communications, where each user harvests energy only from the signals transmitted by a dedicatedly deployed hybrid access point (H-AP), due to the short device-to-device distance in the indoor scenario, each user additionally harvests a sufficient amount of energy from the information signals transmitted by the H-AP and the other user. First, the joint downlink and uplink throughput are maximized for the wireless powered indoor communication system. This problem is non-convex. Thus, the authors manage to transform this problem into a convex one and solve it using convex optimization techniques. The solutions reveal that the total throughput increases largely over a reduced device-to-device distance due to the resultant harvested energy from both energy and information signals at each user. However, an unfair downlink versus uplink rate allocation phenomenon is observed. Thus, considering the importance of uplink communication quality for various indoor applications, a new problem is further proposed to maximize the uplink sum-throughput over both users with an additional constraint to ensure a sufficient downlink rate. This problem is also shown to be non-convex and is solved optimally by using a method similar to that in the first problem. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for improving the downlink versus uplink rate allocation fairness in the indoor wireless-powered communication system.

In this article, we investigate two-tier non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based wireless powered communication networks. The considered network consists of a hybrid access point and two groups of users, namely near and far users. A near user and a far user are selected to form a NOMA pair, which harvest energy during the downlink phase and transmit information during the uplink phase. Specifically, we consider two cases of energy-transfer time and analyze the corresponding performance. We first analyze the performance of the case with fixed energy-transfer time and derive the exact expression for the ergodic rate. Due to the doubly near-far effect, the far user experiences poor performance. To address this issue, an adaptive energy-transfer time scheme is designed by maximizing the far user's data rate, and the optimal solution is derived. To reduce the system complexity, a suboptimal solution is proposed, and the ergodic rate's exact expression is derived. Simulation results reveal that the suboptimal solution achieves near-optimal performance and has a lower computational complexity. Moreover, a one-tier NOMA network is set to be a benchmark, and numerical results show that the two-tier system outperforms the one-tier system significantly under the appropriate radius setting.