Outage Probability and Throughput of SWIPT Relay Networks with Differential Modulation

In this paper, we investigate the application of differential modulation in simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) relay networks. Considering time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) receiver architectures, we adopt a moments-based approach to derive novel expressions for the outage probability and throughput of SWIPT relay systems with the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocol. We quantify the impact of several system parameters involving the energy conversion efficiency and the TS and PS ratio assumptions, imposed on the energy harvesting (EH) relay terminal. Our results reveal that the throughput performance of the TS protocol is superior to that of the PS protocol at lower receive signal-to-noise (SNR) values, which is in contrast to point-to-point SWIPT systems. A Monte Carlo simulation study is presented to corroborate the proposed analysis.