Simulation and modelling of wireless power in cooperative networks

Abstract

The rapid development of low power wireless electronic systems has led to countless research activities in connection with the feasibility of a remote or wireless powering of those systems. Therefore, wireless power transmission (WPT), also called wireless energy harvesting, has become a focal point of interest for many years. This is the process by which energy is derived from external sources, captured, and stored for small, wireless autonomous devices, then is used for other information transmissions from that device. In wireless relay networks, certain nodes can be used as relay nodes to help forward the information from one or multiple sources to one or multiple destinations efficiently. This is a process that requires much energy, especially because the relay nodes need to keep energy for their own transmission demand sooner or later. Hence, applying energy harvesting in relay networks is indispensable. The main challenge in the design of energy harvesting relay networks is that the available energy at any time instance is essentially random. Hence, optimal transmission protocols to exploit available energy must be designed so that the performance of the network can be improved in a successful way. Motivated by the above issue, in this dissertation, I aim to study the strategy of using energy harvesting technologies in the context of wireless relay networks. Specifically, I focus on studying the performance of energy harvesting enabled relaying networks by applying different energy harvesting strategies or protocols in various models of relaying. On the other hand, the effect of different undesired condition, such as channel estimation error and hardware impairment, on the performance of the proposed energy harvesting schemes for relay networks is also investigated. In order to test and verify the mathematical analysis, a Monte Carlo simulation is set up and run for each analysis result.