Outage and bit error probability analysis in energy harvesting wireless cooperative networks

This study focuses on a wireless powered cooperative communication network (WPCCN), which includes a hybrid access point (HAP), a source and a relay. The considered source and relay are installed without embedded energy supply (EES), thus are dependent on energy harvested from signals from the HAP to power their cooperative information transmission (IT). Taking inspiration from this, the author group investigates into a harvest-then-cooperate (HTC) protocol, whereas the source and the relay first harvest the energy from the AP in a downlink (DL) and then collaboratively work in uplink (UL) for IT of the source. For careful evaluation of the system performance, derivations of the approximate closed-form expression of the outage probability (OP) and an average bit error probability (ABER) for the HTC protocol over Rayleigh fading channels are done. Lastly, the author group performs Monte-Carlo simulations to reassure the numerical results they obtained.