Wireless‐Powered Cooperative Networks with Energy Accumulation

The energy harvesting technique has been regarded as a sustainable solution to prolonging the lifetime of energy constrained wireless networks. This chapter explores a cooperative communication network with wireless‐powered relays as a wireless‐powered cooperative networks (WPCNs). It investigates the advantages of cooperation and energy accumulation in WPCNs. The chapter evaluates the performance of the adaptive transmission (AT) protocol when the wireless‐powered relay can accumulate the harvested energy and compares the results with the non‐energy accumulation case as well as the non‐cooperative harvest‐then‐transmit (HTT) protocol. It provides a study on the energy accumulation process of the wireless‐powered relay by modeling the changing/discharging behavior of the battery as a finite‐state Markov chain. The results of the study demonstrated the superiority of cooperation and energy accumulation over non‐cooperation and non‐energy accumulation in WPCNs.