Energy cooperation for throughput optimization based on save-then-transmit protocol in wireless communication system

Abstract

Green communication and energy saving have been a critical issue in modern wireless communication systems. The concepts of energy harvesting and energy transfer are recently receiving much attention in academic research field. In this paper, we study energy cooperation problems based on save-then-transmit protocol and propose two energy cooperation schemes for different system models: two-node communication model and three-node relay communication model. In both models, all of the nodes transmitting information have no fixed energy supplies and gain energy only via wireless energy harvesting from nature. Besides, these nodes also follow a save-then-transmit protocol. Namely, for each timeslot, a fraction (referred to as save-ratio) of time is devoted exclusively to energy harvesting while the remaining fraction is used for data transmission. In order to maximize the system throughput, energy transfer mechanism is introduced in our schemes, i.e., some nodes are permitted to share their harvested energy with other nodes by means of wireless energy transfer. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes can outperform both the schemes with half-allocate save-ratio and the schemes without energy transfer in terms of throughput performance, and also characterize the dependencies of system throughput, transferred energy, and save-ratio on energy harvesting rate.