Relay Selection and Resource Allocation for Energy Harvesting Cooperative Networks

In this paper, we consider a cooperative wireless network involving two transceiver nodes whose communication is assisted by energy-constrained two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) relay nodes. The transceiver nodes can simultaneously transmit information and energy, and the relay nodes harvest the energy from the received signal and use the harvested energy to amplify and retransmit the received signal to the transceiver nodes. We consider a power splitting-based relaying (PSR) protocol as well as a time switching-based relaying (TSR) protocol to effect simultaneous extraction of information and harvesting of energy at the relay. We address the problem of sum-rate maximization under constraints on the total transmit power and the harvested energy in both scenarios. In order to solve this problem, we propose an optimal resource allocation and relay selection scheme. The performance of the proposed PSR and TSR protocols is illustrated by numerical simulations.