A Transmit Antenna Selection based Energy-Harvesting MIMO Cooperative Communication System

Abstract

This paper considers a cooperative wireless system with multiple antennas at the source. A multi-antenna relay equipped with a power splitter is introduced between the source and destination. It utilizes the energy from the received signal for amplification and transmit it to the destination. The linear precoding techniques such as zero forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) are used to reduce the interference. We compare two antenna selection techniques viz. norm-based antenna selection (NBAS) and received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) based antenna selection (RSBAS). It is analyzed that the NBAS and RSBAS antenna selection techniques offer improvement of 20% and 37% over random antenna selection technique. However, the antenna selection technique NBAS offers improvement in system bit error rate (BER) performance by 14% as compared to RSBAS at SNR value of 0 dB. We presented a scenario where the energy harvesting at relay node offers saving the battery power at the user node. Hence, the presented analysis is applicable in communication with remote sensors. This paper also analyses that the BER is improved with the reduction in the distance between source and relay for the given value of energy harvesting efficiency.