Performance Analysis of Wireless Energy Harvesting Multihop Cluster-Based Networks Over Nakagami-m Fading Channels

This paper studies the performance analysis of wireless energy harvesting (EH) cluster-based multi-hop networks, where all communication nodes harvest energy from the radiated signals transmitted by multiple power beacons (PBs) to support the information transmission. To this end, we propose three relay selection schemes. The first scheme tries to select the relay harvesting the largest energy to forward information. The second scheme chooses the relay, providing the best data channel gain from the transmitter to forward information. In the third scheme, two relays in two consecutive clusters will be selected based on the maximum EH link and maximum data link. The destination node is equipped with multiple antennas and applies the maximal ratio combining technique to combine its received signal. The system performances in terms of outage probability of three schemes are evaluated in Nakagami-m fading environments and verified by Monte Carlo simulations.