Cooperative Strategies for Wireless-Powered Communications

Radio frequency (RF) energy transfer and harvesting has been intensively studied recently as a promising approach to significantly extend the lifetime of energy-constrained wireless networks. This technique has a great potential to provide relatively stable and continuous RF energy to devices wirelessly, it thus opened a new research paradigm, termed wireless-powered communication (WPC), which has raised many new research opportunities with wide applications. Among these, the design and evaluation of cooperative schemes towards energy-efficient WPC have attracted tremendous research interests nowadays. This article provides an overview of various energy-efficient cooperative strategies for WPC, with particular emphasis on relaying protocols for wireless-powered cooperative communications, cooperative spectrum sharing schemes for wireless-powered cognitive radio networks, and cooperative jamming strategies towards wireless-powered secure communications. We also identify some valuable research directions in this area before concluding this article.