# Distributed Beamforming with Wirelessly Powered Relay Nodes

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes distributed beamforming with relay nodes that harvest energy wirelessly, deriving approximate SNR expressions for different energy harvesting policies and comparing their performance.

## Contribution

It provides analytical expressions for mean SNR in energy-harvesting relay systems under different policies, highlighting the impact of parameters and synchronization errors.

## Key findings

- Approximate SNR expressions are accurate for small relay numbers.
- Time-switching policy outperforms power-splitting by at least 3 dB.
- Simulation confirms the effectiveness of the analytical models.

## Abstract

This paper studies a system where a set of $N$ relay nodes harvest energy from the signal received from a source to later utilize it when forwarding the source's data to a destination node via distributed beamforming. To this end, we derive (approximate) analytical expressions for the mean SNR at destination node when relays employ: i) time-switching based energy harvesting policy, ii) power-splitting based energy harvesting policy. The obtained results facilitate the study of the interplay between the energy harvesting parameters and the synchronization error, and their combined impact on mean SNR. Simulation results indicate that i) the derived approximate expressions are very accurate even for small $N$ (e.g., $N=15$), ii) time-switching policy by the relays outperforms power-splitting policy by at least $3$ dB.