Performance and optimal analysis of time-switching energy harvesting protocol for MIMO full-duplex decode-and-forward wireless relay networks with various transmitter and receiver diversity techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) full-duplex relaying (FDR) network, where a source node communicates with a destination node via the help of a decode-and-forward (DF) relay node. This relay node has the capability of harvesting the energy from radio frequency (RF) signals, in particular, from the source node via time-switching energy harvesting protocol. To enhance the quality of transmission, diversity techniques are applied at both transmitter and receiver. Specifically, transmit antenna selection (TAS) and maximal ratio transmission (MRT) schemes are employed at the transmitter, while both selection combining (SC) and maximal ratio combining (MRC) techniques are considered at the destination node. The main contribution of this paper is an in-depth performance and optimal analysis of the time-switching energy harvesting (EH) protocol by deriving the closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP), system throughput, and symbol error probability (SEP) of the considered system over Rayleigh fading channel and then solving the optimization problem of EH duration, where the instantaneous throughput is used as the objective function. It is also shown in this paper that although a portion of signal is used for power transfer, the obtained diversity gain of this system is still equal to the minimum number of the antennas configured at the source or at the destination. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the validity of our analysis and to show the advantages of MIMO-FDR system with RF EH.