Exact outage analysis of energy-harvesting multihop cluster-based networks with multiple power beacons over Nakagami-m fading channels

Abstract

In this paper, we propose energy-harvesting cluster-based multi-hop networks, where all communicating nodes simultaneously harvest energy from radio frequency (RF) radiation transmitted by multiple dedicated power beacons (PBs) to support data transmission. At each hop, relay selection is applied to choose the forwarder. For performance evaluation, we derive the exact and asymptotic expressions of the system outage probability (OP) over Nakagami-m fading channels and then perform Monte Carlo simulations to verify the theoretical analysis results. The obtained results show that the number of relays, the number of PBs as well as the positions of PBs have significant impact on the system performance. In addition, we investigate the optimal time switching ratio and the optimal number of hops.