Outage Probability of Energy Harvesting Relay-Aided Cooperative Networks Over Rayleigh Fading Channel

Energy harvesting technique is a potential way for relay node energy supply in cooperative networks with respect to deployment flexibility and maintenance charge reduction. However, unlike traditional power source, it is intuitive that the fluctuation of harvested energy flow can degrade the benefit resulted from relay-aided cooperative transmission. To this end, this paper focuses on the performance analysis of an energy harvesting relay-aided cooperative network under slow fading channel from a perspective of outage behavior and attempts deriving the closed-form expression of outage probability of the proposed cooperative protocol. Compared with simple direct transmission protocol, it is proved that a multiplicative gain for improving system performance in terms of minimizing outage probability can be obtained by energy harvesting relay-aided cooperative transmission. In particular, if there are multiple available relay nodes around the environment or the energy-exhausted probability of relay node is small, it is very profitable to employ relay-aided cooperative transmission protocol.