Performance enhancement for energy harvesting based two-way relay protocols in wireless ad-hoc networks with partial and full relay selection methods

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two relay selection methods to enhance system outage performance for energy harvesting (EH) based two-way relaying protocols in wireless adhoc networks. In the proposed protocol, two source nodes communicate with each other via the assistance of multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays using three-phase digital network coding. At the first and second phases, two sources broadcast their data to the relays. Employing a power-splitting model, the relays would harvest energy from radio frequency (RF) signals of the sources to transmit the data at the third phase. We propose a simple partial relay selection (PRS) method and an opportunistic relay selection (ORS) method to enhance the reliability of data transmission at the cooperative phase. For performance evaluation, we derive exact and asymptotic expressions of the system outage probability (SOP) for the proposed protocols over block Rayleigh fading channels. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are presented to verify the theoretical derivations as well as to compare the performance of the proposed protocols with that of the random relay selection protocol.