Opportunistic Routing aided Cooperative Communication Network with Energy-Harvesting Nodes

In this paper, a cooperative communication network based on two energy-harvesting (EH) decode-and-forward (DF) relays which harvest energy from the ambience using buffers with harvest-store-use (HSU) architecture is considered. For improving the data delivery in this network, an opportunistic routing (OR) algorithm considering channel status information (CSI), location and energy buffer status of relays is proposed. For the sake of deriving the theoretical expressions for limiting distribution of energy stored in buffers with discrete-time continuous-state space Markov chain (DCSMC) model, the probabilities that the packet to be forwarded exists in one and more transmitting nodes are obtained based on the state transition matrix (STM). Moreover, the closed-form expressions for outage probability and throughput of the network based on the CSI and the limiting distributions of energy stored in buffers are presented. Numerous experiments have been performed to verify the derived theoretical expressions.