Applied Method of Energy Harvesting for Multi-Relay Environment

In this paper, an energy harvesting scheme is investigated in the multi-relay cooperation communication. Our proposal is to maximize the diversity gain and overcome the disadvantages of the limited power wireless devices. The best relay is selected based on the maximizing channel gains from source to relays so that the harvested energy at selected relay is best. If an internal power of the best relay is lower than a defined target power, the best relay will harvest the energy from the source, and the help of the source-destination link is changed to the second best relay. By this operation method, the diversity gain is maintained and the performance of the network is improved. Finally, performance of the proposed protocol is analyzed in terms of bit error rate, utilization efficiency, power collection efficiency.