Wireless-powered cooperative communications: protocol design, performance analysis and resource allocation

Radio frequency (RF) energy transfer technique has attracted much attention and has recently been regarded as a key enabling technique for wireless-powered communications. However, the high attenuation of RF energy transfer over distance has greatly limited the performance and applications of WPCNs in practical scenarios. To overcome this essential hurdle, in this thesis we propose to combat the propagation attenuation by incorporating cooperative communication techniques in WPCNs. This opens a new paradigm named wireless-powered cooperative communication and raises many new research opportunities with promising applications. In this thesis, we focus on the novel protocol design, performance analysis and resource allocation of wireless-powered cooperative communication networks (WPCCNs). We first propose a harvest-then-cooperate (HTC) protocol for WPCCNs, where the wireless-powered source and relay(s) harvest energy from the AP in the downlink (DL) and work cooperatively in the uplink (UL) for transmitting source information. The average throughput performance of the HTC protocol with two single relay selection schemes is analyzed. We then design two novel protocols and study the optimal resource allocation for another setup of WPCCNs with a hybrid relay that has a constant power supply. Besides cooperating with the source for UL information transmission, the hybrid relay also transmits RF energy concurrently with the AP during the DL energy transfer phase. Subsequently, we adopt the Stackelberg game to model the strategic interactions in power beacon (PB)-assisted WPCCNs, where PBs are deployed to provide wireless charging services to wireless-powered users via RF energy transfer and are installed by different operators with the AP. Finally, we develop a distributed power splitting framework using non-cooperative game theory for a large-scale WPCCN, where multiple source-destination pairs communicate through their dedicated wireless-powered relays