Energy Harvesting Cooperative Wireless Systems: Probabilistic Modeling and Statistical Analysis

In this work, we consider a two-hop cooperative wireless system that consists of multiple energy harvesting (EH) relays. The system uses a time-switching based relaying protocol for EH and information processing at the amplify-and-forward (AF) relay nodes. For it, we formulate an order statistics problem of finding the distribution of maximum energy harvested among several EH relay nodes by considering two different fading models, namely, path loss and Rayleigh fading model, path loss and shadow fading model. For these models, we derive analytical expressions for the mean value of maximum harvested energy distribution. Furthermore, we also present an insightful outage analysis and numerical results to validate the analytical expressions. The analysis that we present lead to an essential application of the best EH relay selection in EH cooperative wireless systems and networks.