Joint Power Splitting and Relay Selection in Energy-Harvesting Communications for IoT Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we consider an energy-harvesting (EH) relay system consisting of a source, a destination, and multiple EH decode-and-forward (DF) relays that can harvest the energy from their received radio signals. A power-splitting ratio is employed at an EH DF relay to characterize a trade-off between an energy used for decoding the source signal received at the relay and the remaining energy harvested for retransmitting the decode outcome. We propose an optimal power splitting and relay selection (OPS-RS) framework and also consider the conventional equal power splitting and relay selection (EPS-RS) for comparison purposes. We derive closed-form expressions of outage probability for both the OPS-RS and EPS-RS schemes and characterize their diversity gains through an asymptotic outage analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio region. We further examine an extension of our OPS-RS framework to an energy-harvesting battery (EHB) enabled cooperative relay scenario, where the EH relays are equipped with batteries used to store their harvested energies. We propose an amplify-and-forward (AF) based EHB-OPS-RS and a DF based EHB-OPS-RS schemes for AF and DF relay networks, respectively. Numerical results show that the proposed OPS-RS always outperforms the EPS-RS in terms of outage probability. Moreover, the outage probabilities of AF and DF based EHB-OPS-RS schemes are much smaller than that of OPS-RS and EPS-RS methods, demonstrating the benefit of exploiting the batteries in EH relays. Additionally, the DF based EHB-OPS-RS substantially outperforms the AF based EHB-OPS-RS and such an outage advantage becomes more significant, as the number of EH relays increases.