Performance Analysis for SWIPT Cooperative DF Communication Systems with Hybrid Receiver and Non-Linear Energy Harvesting Model

In this paper, we study the outage and throughput performance for the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) cooperative decode-and-forward (DF) communication systems. The hybrid receiver that uses both time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) methods for energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding (ID), and the piece-wise linear EH model that captures the non-linear input-output characteristic of the EH circuit, are considered. We present exact analytical expressions of the outage probability (OP) and throughput, which are expressed as single definite integral on finite interval and can be easily evaluated, for the systems in Rayleigh fading channel. For further simplicity of calculation, we derive novel and closed-form approximate expressions of the OP and throughput. The impact of different system parameters on the system performance is investigated. Numerical results show the high accuracy of the proposed closed-form approximate expressions especially in the region of higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It is also shown that the system performance is greatly overestimated when the ideal linear EH model is used instead of the practical non-linear EH model. A different result to the non-hybrid receiver with both linear EH model and non-linear EH model that there exists an optimal location to minimize the OP for the hybrid receiving relay node with non-linear EH model is also demonstrated.