On maximizing information reliability in wireless powered cooperative networks

Unpredictable nature of fading channels and difficulty in tracking channel state information pose major challenge in wireless energy harvesting communication system design. In this work, we address relay selection problem for wireless powered communication networks, where the relays harvest energy from the source radio frequency signals. A single source–destination pair is considered without a direct link. The connecting relay nodes are equipped with storage batteries of infinite size. We assume that the channel state information (CSI) on the source–relay link is available at the relay nodes. Depending on the availability of the CSI on the relay–destination link at the relay node, we propose two relay selection schemes and evaluate their outage probability. Availability of the CSI at the relay node on the relay–destination link considerably improves the performance due to additional flexibility in the relay selection mechanism. Due to absence of CSI throughout the network at the time of transmission path selection, the analysis of the problem is not tractable. Therefore, we relax our assumptions on availability of CSI and closed-form expressions of the outage probability as a function of the amount of the available harvested energy are derived for both CSI availability cases. Finally, we numerically quantify the performance for the proposed schemes and compare the outage probability for fixed and equal number of wireless powered forwarding relays.