A Relay Selection Protocol for Wireless Energy Harvesting Relay Networks

In this paper, we consider a dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relaying network, where relays operate based on harvested energy from radio frequency (RF) radiation. Considering time switching-based relaying mechanism, we propose a relay selection protocol, where the relay having the highest harvested energy will forward the received signal towards the destination. We investigate the system performance in terms of outage probability over Rayleigh fading channels. In particular, we derive the analytical expression of the system outage probability and the closed-form expression of its lower bound of the proposed protocol. The analysis results are validated by the Monte-Carlo simulation results. The numerical results show that the proposed relay selection and the number of relays have significant impacts on the system outage probability.