Opportunistic Routing Aided Cooperative Communication MRC Network With Energy-Harvesting Nodes

In this research, we present a cooperative communication network based on two energy-harvesting (EH) decode-and-forward (DF) relays that contain the harvest-store-use (HSU) architecture and may harvest energy from the surrounding environment by utilizing energy buffers. To improve the performance of this network, an opportunistic routing (OR) algorithm is presented that takes into account channel status information, relay position, and energy buffer status, as well as using the maximal ratio combining (MRC) at the destination to combine the signals received from the source and relays. The theoretical expressions for limiting distribution of energy stored in infinite-size buffers are derived from the discrete-time continuous-state space Markov chain model (DCSMC). In addition, the theoretical expressions for outage probability, throughput, and per-packet time slot cost in the network are obtained utilizing both the limiting distributions of energy buffers and the probabilities of transmitter candidates set. Through numerous simulation results, it is demonstrated that simulation results match with corresponding theoretical results.