## 1 Introduction  
With the rapid development of 5G and Internet of things (IoT), the sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are growing exponentially, which results in the relative shortage of spectrum resource and energy in wireless communication networks. DCSK is the most popular chaos-based incoherent digital modulation scheme, which is outstanding for low-power and anti-fading [1, 2]. It is considered as an excellent solution for energy limited WSNs. In the conventional DCSK scheme [3], the reference chaotic signal is transmitted during the first half of bit duration, and the information-bearing signal is transmitted during the second half of bit duration, which results in low energy efficiency (EE) and data rate. Hence, to improve various performances of DCSK, a large number of variants have been derived. A new short reference orthogonal double bit rate differential chaotic shift keying (SR-ODBR-DCSK) communication scheme is proposed in [4], which utilizes the orthogonality of chaotic signals to transmit odd information bits and even information bits and doubles transmission rate. A new fractional-order multi-carrier M-ary differential chaos shift keying system with multilevel code-shifted modulation (MC-MDCSK-MCS) is introduced in [5], which employs multiple subcarriers to transmit multiple MCS-MDCSK-modulated signals simultaneously and achieves higher bit rate. Index modulation (IM) [6] uses indexes of carriers to transmit information bits, which effectively adjusts spectrum efficiency (SE) and EE of the system. In the past few years, systems combined DCSK with code index [7, 8], multi-carrier index [9, 10, 11, 12], and position pulse modulation (PPM) index [13] have been proposed, which reduce the power consumption while effectively improving the BER performance compared to DCSK. Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) [14] is an excellent solution for energy-limited WSN, which transmit information and energy simultaneously by wireless signal without requiring additional signals or spectrum. As incoherent-enabled SWIPT schemes have the advantages of low energy consumption and low complexity without requiring channel estimation, they have become an excellent alternative to coherent-enabled SWIPT. Over the past decade, plenty of research has been extensively devoted to designing SWIPT schemes based on DCSK. Ref. [15] investigates a buffer-aided DCSK-SWIPT relay system, which employs a decode-and-forward protocol without acquiring channel state information. Ref. [16] presents a DCSK-based wireless power transfer architecture, which employs an analog correlator at the receiver to boost the energy harvesting (EH) performance. Ref. [17] introduces two carrier index differential chaos shift keying with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (CI-DCSK SWIPT) schemes that employ time switching, which reduce the transmission energy consumption and have excellent BER performance. However, in CI-DCSK SWIPT systems, the number of index carriers is limited to power-of-2 and the number of active carriers can only be 1 or \(n-1\); thus the performance and the flexibility of the system are limited. To overcome the disadvantages of CI-DCSK SWIPT, GCI-DCSK which can flexibly adjust the number of index carriers and active carriers is combined with SWIPT. As both path loss and the noise generated by RF signal to base-band conversion are not considered in CI-DCSK SWIPT, which are very important for SWIPT-based systems to be consistent with the actual situation. Hence, a GCI-DCSK SWIPT scheme integrating GCI-DCSK with SWIPT is investigated in this paper, which not only improves the flexibility, but also takes the path loss and the conversion noise into consideration. The BER performance, sustainability, EE, and SE of the proposed system are analyzed. Moreover, the performance of GCI-DCSK SWIPT is compared with those of CI-DCSK1/2 SWIPT and GCI-DCSK, respectively. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the system is introduced.