Prioritizing Data/Energy Thresholding-Based Antenna Switching for SWIPT-Enabled Secondary Receiver in Cognitive Radio Networks

Simultaneous wireless power and information transfer is considered in cognitive radio networks with a multiantenna energy harvesting (EH) secondary receiver (SR). The SR harvests the energy from the secondary transmitter and primary transmitter. The SR uses the antenna switching (AS) technique which selects a subset of antennas to decode the information [namely, the information decoding (ID) antennas] and the rest to harvest the energy (namely the EH antennas). The AS technique is performed via a thresholding-based strategy inspired from the maximum ratio combining technique with an output threshold which is proposed in two ways: 1) the prioritizing data selection (PDS) scheme and 2) the prioritizing energy selection (PES) scheme. For both schemes, we study the expressions and the asymptotic results of the probability mass function of the selected ID antennas, the average harvested energy, the power outage probability, and the data outage probability. We deduce the performance of the joint PDS and PES scheme. We evaluate all performance metrics for the Rayleigh and Nakagami fading channels. Through the simulation results, we show the impact of different simulation parameters on the performance metrics. We also show that there is a tradeoff between the data and energy performance metrics.