RF energy harvesting in DF relay networks in the presence of an interfering signal

Wireless energy harvesting in a decode-and-forward (DF) relay network is studied. The relay node is energy constrained and harvests energy from the radio frequency (RF) signal of the source node. The RF signal also carries information from the source to be forwarded via the relay to a destination in the presence of interference from unknown sources. We study the performance of three relaying protocols, the time switching relaying (TSR) protocol, the power splitting relaying (PSR) protocol and a proposed hybrid TSR-PSR protocol. Analytical expressions for the outage probability and throughput in the delay-sensitive transmission mode are derived for the three protocols. Using the derived expressions, we compare the throughput performances of these protocols. Our results demonstrate that the throughput of the hybrid protocol is generally higher than that of TSR and PSR protocols.