Wireless-powered cooperative communications via a hybrid relay

In this paper, we consider a wireless-powered cooperative communication network, which consists of a hybrid access-point (AP), a hybrid relay, and an information source. In contrast to the conventional cooperative networks, the source in the considered network is assumed to have no embedded energy supply. Thus, it first needs to harvest energy from the signals broadcast by the AP and/or relay, which have constant power supply, in the downlink (DL) before transmitting the information to the AP in the uplink (UL). The hybrid relay can not only help to forward information in the UL but also charge the source with wireless energy transfer in the DL. Considering different possible operations of the hybrid relay, we propose two cooperative protocols for the considered network. We jointly optimize the time and power allocation for DL energy transfer and UL information transmission to maximize the system throughput of the proposed protocols. Numerical results are presented to compare the performance of the proposed protocols and illustrate the impacts of system parameters.