Performance Analysis of Relaying Systems with Fixed and Energy Harvesting Batteries

This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of an energy harvesting (EH) equipped dual-hop relaying system for which the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the overall system throughput are analysed. The transmitter and the relay nodes are equipped with both fixed and EH batteries. The source for harvesting at the transmitter is the solar energy, and at the relay node, the interference energy in the radio frequency is the harvesting source. Time switching scheme is used at the relay to switch between EH and decoding information. Harvest-use approach is implemented, and we investigate the effects of the harvesting energy in enhancing the performance of the relaying system by deriving estimated closed-form expressions for the cumulative distribution function of each link’s individual SNR and of the end-to-end SNR. The analytical expression for the ergodic capacity is also derived. These expressions are validated through Monte-Carlo simulations. It is also shown that with the additional EH at the transmitter (source and relay), a significant improvement in the system throughput can be achieved when fixed batteries are running on low powers.