Outage probability of dual-hop cooperative communication networks over the Nakagami-m fading channel with RF energy harvesting

Cooperative communication systems with wireless power transfer are being investigated for future advanced wireless networks. In this research, we propose applying a wireless power transfer to dual-hop cooperative communication systems, in which a relay node harvests the energy from the radiofrequency in order to forward the received signal, and a source node can communicate with a destination node directly or through the selected relay nodes. The system performance is evaluated by an outage probability that is calculated over independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) Nakagami-m distributions in two scenarios, i.e., integer m and arbitrary m. Furthermore, the closed forms of the outage probability expressions are derived in the case of both the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. The Monte Carlo method is utilized to simulate the system with the aims of evaluating the system performance and verifying the theoretical analysis. The numerical results highlight that the proposed calculation method and the closed form of the outage probability are accurate. We also compare the system performance of both the AF and DF protocols and show the effect of parameter m on the performance of the system. © 2020, Institut Mines-Télécom and Springer Nature Switzerland AG.