Wireless energy harvesting meets receiver diversity: A successful approach for two-way half-duplex relay networks over block Rayleigh fading channel

Recently, energy harvesting (EH) via radio-frequency (RF) signals in wireless relay networks has been attracting a lot of interest, especially for supplying the energy to relay nodes in IoT systems so that they can help exchange the information between source nodes. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze the performance of a novel EH scheme for a two-way half-duplex relay network with two source nodes exchanging the information with the help of a single relay. The relay node harvests the energy from both sources by power splitting EH protocol before using that energy to forward the information from each source to the other. By using the selection combining (SC) at the destinations, we can exploit the direct channel between two source nodes to enhance the overall performance. Three relay strategies are considered in our analysis, namely, amplify-and-forward (AF), decodeand-forward (DF), and hybrid-decode-and-forward (HDAF) strategies. For performance evaluation, we derive the exact expressions of the system outage probability (SOP) over block Rayleigh fading channels. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are presented to verify the theoretical derivations as well as to compare the performance of various configurations of the proposed scheme.