Outage Performance of Power Beacon-Assisted Cooperative Hybrid Decode-Amplify-Forward Relaying Wireless Communications

In this paper, a power beacon (PB) assisted cooperative hybrid decode-amplify-forward (HDAF) relaying wireless communication network is studied. We consider a relaying transmission scheme where the relay may choose to remain silent or transmit information employing decode-and-forward (DF) or amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol based on the qualities of the channels among the source, relay, and destination. In particular, the energy-constrained source and relay harvest energy from radio frequency (RF) signals sent by PB and use the harvested energy to deliver information under the proposed scheme. The closed-form expressions of the outage probability and the throughput over Rayleigh fading channels are derived and demonstrated. Finally, simulations are conducted to convince our theoretical results, and to reveal the impact of the energy harvesting conversion efficency and time allocation factor as well as the outage threshold, which also indicate that the HDAF relaying scheme outperforms the DF and the AF schemes.