Throughput of Wireless-Powered Massive Distributed Antenna Systems Over Composite Fading Channels

—Massive Distributed Antenna System (DAS) with energy harvesting can promisingly satisfy the ever-growing wireless transmission requirements while providing sustainable power supply to the User Equipment (UE). In this paper, we propose a massive DAS with multiple-circle layout, where a large number of Remote Antenna Units (RAUs) are evenly distributed across these circles. Based on the instantaneous channel quality, a RAU is selected for the downlink wireless energy transfer to the UE. Using the harvested energy, the UE transmits information to all the RAUs according to the “harvestthen-transmit” protocol over the uplink. The closed-form asymptotic throughput for an arbitrary UE is derived over composite fading channels, which include the shadowing, fading, and path-loss effects. Subsequently, we analyze the average throughput when the UEs are uniformly distributed in the cell. Performance results are provided to validate our theoretical analysis and reveal the impacts of time allocation, UE locations, and RAU deployment on the system throughput.