Performance analysis of energy-harvesting relay selection systems with multiple antennas in presence of transmit hardware impairments

In this paper, we consider a decoded-and-forward (DF) energy-harvesting system with multiple antennas in the presence of transmit hardware impairments. The relays are energy-constrained nodes that collect energy from the source signals using time-switching architecture. Two partial relay selection (PRS) schemes that are PRS-1 and PRS-2 are employed for simplifying the relay-selection complexity. In particular, for the PRS-1 scheme, the best relay that assists the source-to-destination communication is selected based on the first-hop channel-state-information (CSI) whereas for the PRS-2 scheme, the best relay is selected based on the second-hop CSI. To evaluate the effects of hardware impairments on system performance, the analytical expressions for outage probability and throughput are derived. Monte Carlo simulation and insightful discussion are provided.