Performance of Battery-Assisted Energy Harvesting DF Relay over Nakagami-m Channels

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the performance of the time-switching relaying (TSR) protocol in a two-hop communication link between a multiple antenna source and a multiple antenna destination through a battery assisted energy harvesting (EH) single antenna decode-and-forward relay. We assume a framework in which the EH relay augments the wireless energy harvested with energy drawn from the battery. Assuming Nakagami-m fading channels, the throughput and outage performance are analyzed. We show that how the battery energy and TSR parameter can be optimized. It is shown that when m is large, battery energy consumption is lower. The system diversity is unaffected by energy harvesting at the relay. These results are important for system designers. The derived analytical results are validated by computer simulations. © 2019 IEEE.