Outage Probability Analysis for Energy Harvesting Cooperative Relays in a Clustered Environment

This paper presents the outage probability analysis of the energy harvesting (EH) decode and forward (DF) cooperative relay network when more than one relays are available to assist the communication between source and destination in the presence of the direct connection. The relays use power splitting (PS) protocol with adaptive PS ratio for EH. As wireless EH can be more beneficial over smaller distances therefore a clustered environment is considered in which the source, destination and relays are located in a small area. First, we analyze the performance of selection cooperation (SC) which requires channel state information (CSI) at the source. High signal to noise ratio approximation of the outage probability is provided for this case. Secondly, we present the performance of all relays cooperation (ARC) scheme which requires no CSI at the source. Lower and upper bounds of the outage probability are presented for smaller number of relays in ARC scheme whereas high signal to noise ratio approximation is provided for higher number of relays. Simulation results validate the analytical results and show that SC scheme outperforms ARC scheme at the expense of CSI requirement.