Distributed Multi-Relay Selection in Wireless-Powered Cooperative Networks with Energy Accumulation

This paper investigates a wireless-powered cooperative network (WPCN) consisting of one source-destination pair and multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays. We consider that the DF relays are wireless-powered such that they rely only on the harvested energy from the source to perform information forwarding. Furthermore, these relays are equipped with separate energy and information receivers as well as energy storage to accumulate the harvested energy. In this paper, we develop an energy threshold based multi-relay selection (ETMRS) scheme for the considered WPCN, in which each relay determines to switch between energy harvesting and information forwarding modes in a fully distributed manner. By modeling the charging/ discharging of the discrete-level battery at each relay as a finite state Markov Chain (MC), we derive a closed-form expression for the system outage probability of the proposed ETMRS scheme over independent but not necessarily identical Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis and show that the proposed ETMRS scheme can outperform the existing single-relay selection scheme, especially when the source's transmission rate is relatively high.