A new protocol for energy harvesting decode-and-forward relaying networks

Abstract

This paper investigates radio frequency energy harvesting decode-and-forward (DF) multi-relay networks with hybrid power transfer architecture, i.e. time switching (TS) combines with power splitting (PS). Specifically, this system consists of one source, one destination and multiple energy constraint relay nodes which help to the source transfer information to the destination over Nakagami fading channels. In order to improve the performance and reduce the load of this considered network, an efficient protocol for this system is proposed based on adaptive power splitting ratio adjustment and best relay selection. We aim to evaluate the performance of this considered system by deriving the closed-form expressions for the outage probability (OP) based on the statistical characteristics of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In addition, the results show that this scheme outperforms the random relay selection scheme, including transmit SNR, number of relays, active energy and fading severity factor. Our analysis is also verified by Monte Carlo simulation.