Joint relay selection and energy harvesting to improve performance of cooperative communication systems

This paper focuses on a combining relay selection with energy harvesting (EH), known as joint relay selection with EH (JRSEH), to improve performance in wireless cooperative communication systems. Previous research was examined performance improvement with relay selection (RS) techniques without combined with EH (RS non-EH). This study aims to improve the performance by applying EH and the RS in the cooperative communication system. In the system, a source selects the best relay from several relays that produce the highest SNR value at the destination. The selected best relay performs EH based on time switching. Then, the best relay with EH obtains the power to forward information to the destination using the Amplify and Forward (AF) relay scheme. The channel from source to relay is Rician fading, and from the relay to a destination is Rayleigh fading. The research method used is system modeling and analysis of computer simulations. The system performance is calculated based on the bit error rate (BER) and the throughput in a multi-relay cooperative system with EH and RS. The results show that the performance of the proposed JRSEH higher than that of RS non-EH, multi-relay EH, and multi-relay non-EH.