The Impact of Relay Selection on the Tradeoff Between Information Transmission and Wireless Energy Transfer

In certain applications, relay terminals can be employed to simultaneously deliver information and energy to a designated receiver and a radio frequency (RF) energy harvester, respectively. In such scenarios, the relay that is preferable for information transmission does not necessarily coincide with the relay with the strongest channel to the energy harvester, since the corresponding channels fade independently. Relay selection thus entails a tradeoff between the efficiency of the information transfer to the receiver and the amount of energy transferred to the energy harvester. The study of this tradeoff is the subject on which this work mainly focuses. We propose a relay selection policy that optimizes the quality of information transmission for a given energy transfer constraint. Additionally, we propose two suboptimal relay selection methods that apply to scenarios with limited availability of channel state information and facilitate closed-form analytical results. We conduct a performance analysis that sheds some light on the tradeoff between ergodic capacity and wireless energy transfer, and we prove that the optimal relay selection policy optimizes also other performance metrics for a given energy transfer, such as the outage probability and the error probability.