Performance analysis of multirelay RF energy harvesting cooperative networks with hardware impairments

Abstract

In this study, the authors analyse the outage performance of multirelay decode-and-forward cooperative networks subject to two joint practical issues of wireless communications, namely, energy constraints and transceiver hardware impairment (HI). To deal with energy constraints at relay nodes, radio-frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) technique is adopted. Considering the joint impacts of RF EH technique and HI, two relay selection schemes, namely, harvested energy-based relay selection (HEbS) scheme and channel quality-base relay selection (CQbS) scheme are proposed. Tight closed-form approximate expressions for the outage probability of each scheme are derived and corroborated through Monte Carlo simulations. Some representative performance comparisons are carried out and show that the diversity order achieved by the HEbS scheme is 1 and is independent of the number of relays, K, whereas that achieved by the CQbS scheme is K, which is full diversity.