Effect of Energy Harvesting on Stable Throughput in Cooperative Relay Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how energy harvesting constraints affect the stable throughput in a cooperative relay network with random access, providing bounds that characterize the maximum stable throughput region.

Contribution

It introduces the first analysis connecting energy harvesting with the stability region in cooperative relay networks, deriving tight bounds for the throughput.

Findings

Inner and outer bounds of the stability region are identical.

Energy harvesting impacts the maximum stable throughput.

The study bridges information theory and networking in energy-constrained systems.

Abstract

In this paper, the impact of energy constraints on a two-hop network with a source, a relay and a destination under random medium access is studied. A collision channel with erasures is considered, and the source and the relay nodes have energy harvesting capabilities and an unlimited battery to store the harvested energy. Additionally, the source and the relay node have external traffic arrivals and the relay forwards a fraction of the source node's traffic to the destination; the cooperation is performed at the network level. An inner and an outer bound of the stability region for a given transmission probability vector are obtained. Then, the closure of the inner and the outer bound is obtained separately and they turn out to be identical. This work is not only a step in connecting information theory and networking, by studying the maximum stable throughput region metric but also it taps the relatively unexplored and important domain of energy harvesting and assesses the effect of that on this important measure.