Throughput Analysis in Collaborative Communication Based on Relay Energy Harvesting

Abstract

Wireless powered relaying is a promising cooperative communication technique which has drawn much attention recently. In this paper, we consider the problem of throughput maximization based on relay energy collection in wireless cooperative communication system. When source node transmits radio-frequency (RF) signal with two antennas, relay without initial energy starts to collect energy from RF signal, when collected energy reaches the preset fixed transmission power, relay begin to amplify-and-forward information received from source to destination. We propose two models of energy harvesting (EH) model at the relay—continuous time EH and discrete time EH. For continuous time EH, the EH time can be any percentage of the total transmission block time. For discrete time EH, the whole transmission block is either used for EH or information transmission (IT). The simulation results are perfectly matched with the derived throughput expression, which show the correctness of the expression. The simulation results also show that throughput of the proposed discrete time EH model is better than that of the continuous time EH model.