Effect of energy harvesting on stable throughput in cooperative relay systems

• Published in: Journal of communications and networks Vol. 18; no. 2; pp. 261 - 269
• Main Authors: Pappas, Nikolaos, Kountouris, Marios, Jeongho Jeon, Ephremides, Anthony, Traganitis, Apostolos
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Seoul Editorial Department of Journal of Communications and Networks 01.04.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); 한국통신학회
• Subjects: Batteries; Energy harvesting; Information theory; network-level cooperation; Queueing analysis; random access; relay; Relays; Stability analysis; stable throughput; Throughput; Wireless networks; 전자/정보통신공학; random access; stable throughput; network-level cooperation; Energy harvesting; relay
• ISSN: 1229-2370; 1976-5541; 1976-5541
• DOI: 10.1109/JCN.2016.000035

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.