Throughput analysis of two-way relay networks with wireless energy harvesting capabilities

Wireless energy harvesting is an efficient way to prolong the lifetime of energy constrained networks. This paper considers a two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) based relay network, where two communicating nodes concurrently transmit their information signals to a relay node. The relay node is energy constrained, and it therefore first harvests energy from the received radio frequency (RF) signals. For energy harvesting at a relay node, we have analyzed the performance of two energy harvesting protocols: the time switching based relaying protocol (TSR), and, the hybrid power-time switching based relaying protocol (HPTSR). Once the energy is harvested using one of these protocols the relay then amplifies and forwards the received information signal towards its destination. We derive analytical expressions for the outage probability and achievable throughput for the aforementioned protocols. Our numerical results verify the analytical derivation, and show the effect of different system parameters on achievable throughput. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.