An emerging solution for prolonging the lifetime of energy constrained relay nodes in wireless networks is to avail the ambient radio-frequency (RF) signal and to simultaneously harvest energy and process information. In this paper, an amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying network is considered, where an energy constrained relay node harvests energy from the received RF signal and uses that harvested energy to forward the source information to the destination. Based on the time switching and power splitting receiver architectures, two relaying protocols, namely, i) time switching-based relaying (TSR) protocol and ii) power splitting-based relaying (PSR) protocol are proposed to enable energy harvesting and information processing at the relay. In order to determine the throughput, analytical expressions for the outage probability and the ergodic capacity are derived for delay-limited and delay-tolerant transmission modes, respectively. The numerical analysis provides practical insights into the effect of various system parameters, such as energy harvesting time, power splitting ratio, source transmission rate, source to relay distance, noise power, and energy harvesting efficiency, on the performance of wireless energy harvesting and information processing using AF relay nodes. In particular, the TSR protocol outperforms the PSR protocol in terms of throughput at relatively low signal-to-noise-ratios and high transmission rates.

We consider wireless-powered amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying in cooperative communications, where an energy constrained relay node first harvests energy through the received radio-frequency signal from the source and then uses the harvested energy to forward the source information to the destination node. We propose time-switching based energy harvesting (EH) and information transmission (IT) protocols with two modes of EH at the relay. For continuous time EH, the EH time can be any percentage of the total transmission block time. For discrete time EH, the whole transmission block is either used for EH or IT. The proposed protocols are attractive because they do not require channel state information at the transmitter side and enable relay transmission with preset fixed transmission power. We derive analytical expressions of the achievable throughput for the proposed protocols. The derived expressions are verified by comparison with simulations and allow the system performance to be determined as a function of the system parameters. Finally, we show that the proposed protocols outperform the existing fixed time duration EH protocols in the literature, since they intelligently track the level of the harvested energy to switch between EH and IT in an online fashion, allowing efficient use of resources.

In this paper, we consider a decode-and-forward (DF) relaying network based on wireless energy harvesting. The energy constrained relay node first harvests energy through radio-frequency (RF) signals from the source node. Next, the relay node uses the harvested energy to forward the decoded source information to the destination node. The source node transfers energy and information to the relay node through two mechanisms, i) time switching-based relaying (TSR) and ii) power splitting-based relaying (PSR). Considering wireless energy harvesting constraint at the relay node, we derive the exact analytical expressions of the achievable throughput and ergodic capacity of a DF relaying network for both TSR and PSR schemes. Through numerical analysis, we study the throughput performance of the overall system for different system parameters, such as energy harvesting time, power splitting ratio, and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). In particular, the throughput performance of the PSR scheme outperforms the throughput performance of the TSR scheme for a wide range of SNRs.

In this paper, we propose using a wireless-powered friendly jammer to enable secure communication between a source node and destination node, in the presence of an eavesdropper. We consider a two-phase communication protocol with fixed-rate transmission. In the first phase, wireless power transfer is conducted from the source to the jammer. In the second phase, the source transmits the information-bearing signal under the protection of a jamming signal sent by the jammer using the harvested energy in the first phase. We analytically characterize the long-term behavior of the proposed protocol and derive a closed-form expression for the throughput. We further optimize the rate parameters for maximizing the throughput subject to a secrecy outage probability constraint. Our analytical results show that the throughput performance differs significantly between the single-antenna jammer case and the multiantenna jammer case. For instance, as the source transmit power increases, the throughput quickly reaches an upper bound with single-antenna jammer, while the throughput grows unbounded with multiantenna jammer. Our numerical results also validate the derived analytical results.

Backscatter communication (BackCom), which allows a backscatter node (BN) to communicate with the reader by modulating and reflecting the incident continuous wave from the reader, is considered a promising solution to power the future Internet-of-Things. In this paper, we consider a single BackCom system, where multiple BNs are served by a reader. We propose using the power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), i.e., multiplexing the BNs in different regions or with different backscattered power levels, to enhance the spectrum efficiency of the BackCom system. To better exploit power-domain NOMA, we propose setting the reflection coefficients for multiplexed BNs to be different. Based on this considered model, we develop the reflection coefficient selection criteria. To illustrate the enhanced system with the proposed criteria, we analyze the performance of the BackCom system in terms of the average number of bits that can be successfully decoded by the reader for the two-node pairing case and the average number of successful BNs for the general multiplexing case. Our results show that NOMA achieves the much better performance gain in the BackCom system as compared to its performance gain in the conventional system, which highlights the importance of applying NOMA to the BackCom system.

This paper analyzes the outage performance in finite wireless networks. Unlike most prior works, which either assumed a specific network shape or considered a special location of the reference receiver, we propose two general frameworks for analytically computing the outage probability at any arbitrary location of an arbitrarily-shaped finite wireless network: (i) a moment generating function-based framework which is based on the numerical inversion of the Laplace transform of a cumulative distribution and (ii) a reference link power gain-based framework which exploits the distribution of the fading power gain between the reference transmitter and receiver. The outage probability is spatially averaged over both the fading distribution and the possible locations of the interferers. The boundary effects are accurately accounted for using the probability distribution function of the distance of a random node from the reference receiver. For the case of the node locations modeled by a Binomial point process and Nakagami-m fading channel, we demonstrate the use of the proposed frameworks to evaluate the outage probability at any location inside either a disk or polygon region. The analysis illustrates the location-dependent performance in finite wireless networks and highlights the importance of accurately modeling the boundary effects.