On the Performance of a Wireless Powered Communication System Using a Helping Relay

Abstract

This paper studies the outage performance and system throughput of a bidirectional wireless information and power transfer system with a helping relay. The relay helps forward wireless power from the access point (AP) to the user, and also the information from the user to the AP in the reverse direction. We assume that the relay uses time switching based energy harvesting protocol. The analytical results provide theoretical insights into the effect of various system parameters, such as time switching factor, source transmission rate, transmitting-power-to-noise ratio to system performance for both amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying protocols. The optimal time switching ratio is determined in each case to maximize the information throughput from the user to the AP subject to the energy harvesting and consumption balance constraints at both the relay and the user. All of the above analyses are confirmed by Monte-Carlo simulation.