A Novel Time-Switching Relaying Protocol for Multi-user Relay Networks with SWIPT

In this paper, we propose a new time-switching relaying (TSR) protocol for dual-hop relay networks with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique. The proposed protocol maintains the same receiver complexity of the conventional TSR protocol with the ability for implementing them using the same hardware. We study the performance of the proposed TSR protocol and compare it with the conventional TSR and power-splitting relaying protocols. Unified analytical expressions are derived for the outage probability, achievable throughput, and the ergodic channel capacity, in addition to studying the performance at high signal-to-noise ratio values where a unified approximate expression for the outage probability and expressions for the diversity order and coding gain are provided. The results show that the proposed TSR protocol outperforms the conventional TSR protocol in terms of outage probability and throughput. Also, findings illustrate that applying the SWIPT technique in multi-destination relay networks results in a unity diversity order. In contrast to conventional relaying networks, results show that the best location for the relay node in SWIPT relay networks is either near the source or the destinations but not in between.