Wireless information transfer in relay networks with energy harvesting over non-identical channels

In this paper, the wireless information and power transfer performance in amplify-and-forward (AF) relay net- works with multiple antennas is investigated over dissimilar fading channels. The considered network consists of a power transfer/information source, an energy-constrained relay and a destination. The source and the destination are single antenna devices, whereas the relay is equipped with multiple antennas. To exploit the benefits of multiple antennas, we examine the linear processing scheme, namely maximum ratio combining/transmit antenna selection (MRC/TAS). The closed-form expressions for the outage probability (OP), average symbol error probability (ASEP) and throughput are derived. Accordingly, the impact of various system parameters such as dissimilar kinds of fading channels, energy harvesting time, energy harvesting efficiency, relay location, the number of antennas at the relay node and fading severity factor on the system performance is studied. In final, the numerical results are verified by means of Monte-Carlo simulation.