Outage probability of energy harvesting relay systems under unreliable backhaul connections

Abstract

In this paper, the performance of energy harvesting systems in the presence of unreliable backhaul links is investigated over independent but not necessarily identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) Nakagami-m fading channels. In particular, the energy-constrained relay uses the amount of harvested energy from the best small-cell transmitter based on time switching-based relaying (TRS) protocol to process for the next hop transmission. We derived the closed-form expression of the outage probability and the asymptotic expression in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Our results show that under the unreliable backhaul links the outage probability yields the error-floor in the high SNR regime which demonstrates the significant impact of the backhaul unreliability.