Cooperative Relaying with Energy Harvesting: Performance Analysis Using Extreme Value Theory

This paper studies the end-to-end performance of dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying systems, where the relays have no constant power supplies but can harvest energy from both the desired signal and nearby co-channel interferences (CCIs). A hybrid energy harvesting (EH) protocol, which is a combination of the existing time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) protocols, is adopted at the relays. To enhance system performance, an opportunistic relay selection is exploited and the extreme value theory is applied to analyze the asymptotic throughput of the system. Our analysis reveals that when the number of relays (N) is sufficiently large, the system throughput scales with ln lnN. Moreover, the hybrid EH protocol is demonstrated to outperform both TS and PS protocols while it is equivalent to PS protocol in the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) region.