Opportunistic Routing-Aided Cooperative Communication Network With Energy Harvesting

In this article, a cooperative communication network based on energy-harvesting (EH) decode-and-forward (DF) relays that harvest energy from the ambience using buffers with the harvest-store-use (HSU) architecture is considered. An opportunistic routing (OR) protocol, which selects the transmission path of packet based on the node transmission priority, is proposed to improve data delivery in this network. Additionally, an algorithm based on the state transition matrix (STM) is proposed to obtain the probability distribution of the candidate broadcast node set. Based on the probability distribution, the existence conditions and the theoretical expressions for the limiting distribution of energy in energy buffers using a discrete-time continuous-state space Markov chain (DCSMC) model are derived. Furthermore, the closed-form expressions for network outage probability and throughput are obtained with the help of the limiting distributions of energy stored in buffers. Numerous experiments have been performed to validate the derived theoretical expressions of the performance of this cooperative communication network.