Cooperative Transmission in Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer Networks

In this paper, we consider a cooperative simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) network with one source-destination pair and multiple energy harvesting relays. How to efficiently use these relays has been addressed in conventional cooperative networks, and this paper investigates the impact of SWIPT on the performance of such multirelay cooperative networks. In particular, the main contribution of this paper is that a closed-form expression of the outage probability achieved by the multirelay cooperative protocol is obtained, as well as its approximation at high SNR. In addition, the performance of the cooperative network with the SWIPT relays is compared with that in conventional systems with self-powered relays.