Investigation on energy harvesting enabled device-to-device networks in presence of co-channel interference

Abstract

Energy harvesting from ambient radio-frequency (RF) sources has been a novel approach for extending the lifetime of wireless networks. In this paper, a cooperative device-to-device (D2D) system with the aid of energy-constrained relay is considered. The relays are assumed to be able to harvest energy from information signal and cochannel interference (CCI) signals broadcasted by nearby traditional cellular users and forward the source's signal to its desired destination (D2D user) utilizing amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocol. Time switching protocol (TSR) and power splitting protocol (PSR) are proposed to assist energy harvesting and information processing at the relay. The proposed approaches are applied in a model with three nodes including the source (D2D user), the relay and the destination (D2D user), the system throughput is investigated in terms of the ergodic capacity and the outage capacity, where the analytical results are obtained approximately. Our numerical results verify the our derivations, and also points out the impact of CCI on system performance. Finally, this investigation provide fundamental design guidelines for selecting hardware of energy harvesting circuits that satisfies the requirements of a practical cooperative D2D system.