Opportunistic Routing Aided Cooperative Communication Network with Energy-Harvesting

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-harvesting cooperative communication network with an opportunistic routing protocol and analyzes its performance using Markov chain models, deriving outage probability and throughput expressions validated by experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel opportunistic routing protocol for EH-based cooperative networks and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing energy buffer distributions and network performance.

Findings

Derived closed-form expressions for outage probability and throughput.

Validated theoretical models with extensive experiments.

Demonstrated improved data delivery through opportunistic routing.

Abstract

In this paper, a cooperative communication network based on energy-harvesting (EH) decode-and-forward (DF) relays that harvest energy from the ambience using buffers with harvest-store-use (HSU) architecture is considered. An opportunistic routing (OR) protocol, which selects the transmission path of packet based on the node transmission priority, is proposed to improve data delivery in this network. Additionally, an algorithm based on state transition matrix (STM) is proposed to obtain the probability distribution of the candidate broadcast node set. Based on the probability distribution, the existence conditions and the theoretical expressions for the limiting distribution of energy in energy buffers using discrete-time continuous-state space Markov chain (DCSMC) model are derived. Furthermore, the closed-form expressions for network outage probability and throughput are obtained with the help of the limiting distributions of energy stored in buffers. Numerous experiments have been performed to validate the derived theoretical expressions.