Analysing outage probability of linear and non-linear RF energy harvesting of cooperative communication networks

In this study, a dual-hop cooperative communication system with radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting was investigated in two cases of linear and non-linear energy harvesting models. In the proposed system, the signal is transmitted directly from a source node to a destination node or sent with support of selected relay nodes. While both the source node and the destination node are powered normally, the relay nodes are powered by harvesting technique. To choose the best relay node, a selection combination method was applied at the destination node in both cases of amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward protocols. To evaluate the system performance, the outage probability of the cooperative communications over independent identically distributed Nakagami-m was derived and analysed with arbitrary m parameter whereas this parameter was fixed to be integral value in previous research studies. Furthermore, the approximate and asymptotic operations are applied to simplify the outage probability expressions. The simulation program was developed based on the Monte Carlo method and MATLAB software with two aims of evaluating the system performance and verifying the theoretical results. The simulation results demonstrate that the analysis and evaluation of the study are considerably accurate. © 2020 The Institution of Engineering and Technology