  In this paper, we investigate the joint beamforming and power splitting
design problem in a base station (BS) cluster-based cloud radio access network
(C-RAN) with multicast fronthaul, where users are jointly served by BSs within
each cluster. Meanwhile, each user can simultaneously obtain information and
energy from received signals. On this basis, under predefined minimum harvested
energy of each user and maximum transmit power of each BS and central
processor, we formulate a sum rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing
multicast fronthaul beamforming, cooperative access beamforming and power split
ratios. Due to the difficulty in solving the formulated problem, we first
transform it into a convex one by successive convex approximate and
semidefinite program (SDP) relaxation techniques, and then propose an effective
iterative algorithm. Moreover, we design a randomization method that can always
obtain the rank-one solution. Finally, numerical results are conducted to
validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.
