Cooperative communication protocols with energy harvesting relays

Abstract

This paper proposes new cooperative protocols based on energy harvesting relays. The protocols are based on the time switching and power splitting receiver architectures. The proposed protocols provide a fair cooperation, such that the relay does not use its own energy to help the source but harvests energy from the source signal. Assuming that the source knows channel statistics, the throughput achieved by the protocols can be larger than that of direct transmission depending on system parameters. We provide analytical expressions of the outage probability and study the effect of various system parameters on the performance of the protocols.