Nonlinear energy-harvesting relaying with beamforming and hardware impairments in <bold>-</bold> shadowed fading environment

In this paper, the energy harvesting in a decode- and- forward ( DF) relaying system with beamforming and hardware impairments that is based on a realistic nonlinear model is studied under.. -.. shadowed fading environments. This study was undertaken in consideration of a source and a destination that are equipped with multiple antennas and communication that occurs through a single- antenna energy- constrained DF relay. At the relay node, a nonlinear energy harvester is assumed, which limits the level of the harvested power with a saturation threshold. Here, a power- splitting- based relaying protocol is considered, whereby new and exact analytical expressions are derived for the outage probability and throughput under.. -.. shadowed fading, accounting for hardware impairments at all nodes. The.. -.. shadowed fading model is capable of modeling the different kinds of empirical wireless channels that undergo either shadowing or fading and fading and shadowing simultaneously, including the particular cases of the.. -.., Rician shadowed, Rician, Nakagami- m(boolean AND), and Rayleigh fading channels. The authors analyze the system performance for different system parameters such as the power splitting ratio, number of antennas, hardware impairments, saturation threshold power, and fading and shadowing parameters. These results are then generalized and can easily be reduced for an ideal hardware and linear energy- harvesting relaying, and for a number of particular cases including the Rayleigh/ Rayleigh, Nakagami- m(boolean AND)/ Nakagami- m(boolean AND), Rician/ Rician, Rician shadowed/ Rician shadowed, and mixed.. -.. shadowed,.. -.., Rician shadowed, Rician, Nakagami- m(boolean AND), and Rayleigh fading channels. The results of this study are helpful in terms of the analysis of the performance of the energy- harvesting DF relay network under a variety of environments for which the fading and the shadowing arise jointly and separately.