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RF energy harvesting in a decode-and-forward wireless relay network Elmorshedy, Lina

Abstract

Wireless communication has experienced tremendous growth over the past three decades. This led to the development of many novel technologies aimed at enhancing the system performance due to the limited availability of radio resources. Cooperative relaying is a promising technology which enhances transmission reliability using simple hardware. However, the extra power consumed for the process of information relaying may be an issue. Recent advances in wireless energy transfer have made it possible for self-sustainable relays that power themselves by capturing ambient energy wirelessly. In this thesis we focus on two technologies, namely, cooperative relaying which enhances the energy efficiency and reliability by allowing multi-hop communication with low power nodes, and Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting which obviates the need for a battery by capturing the ambient RF energy and using it as a source power. In the first part of the thesis, we study RF energy harvesting in a Decode-and-Forward (DF) Wireless Relay Network (WRN) in the presence of an interferer node. We consider the Time Switching Relaying (TSR) protocol, the Power Splitting Relaying (PSR) protocol and we propose a new hybrid TSR-PSR protocol. We derive expressions for the outage probability and throughput in the delay-sensitive transmission mode for the three relaying protocols, and compare their performances. For simplicity, we neglect the energy harvested from the interferer signal. In the second part, we study the general case in which we include the effect of harvesting energy from the interferer signal. Expressions for the outage probability and throughput in the delay-sensitive transmission mode are derived for the three relaying protocols. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the effect of including RF energy harvesting from the interferer. In the third part, we study shared and non-shared power allocation schemes for a two-hop DF WRN with multiple source-destination pairs. The pairs communicate via a single relay which harvests RF energy from the source transmissions in the presence of an interfering signal. The studied schemes are compared in terms of outage probability, throughput in the delay-sensitive transmission mode and fairness.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International