Outage Probability Analysis of Power Splitting SWIPT Relay Networks in Nakagami-m Fading Channel

We analyze the outage performance of a decode-and-forward (DF) relaying system with joint decoding over Nakagami-m fading channels in this paper, where the relay node has simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) capability. The relay node adopts a power splitting (PS) protocol to divide the power from the source node into two parts: information transfer and energy harvesting. The destination node performs maximal ratio combining (MRC) to combine the received signals from the source and the relay nodes. For the above-described system, the outage probability of the DF relaying protocol is derived. A series of Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis. The simulation results are well matched with the theoretical analyses. Furthermore, we identify the optimal ratio of power splitting to minimize the outage probability. It is shown that the optimal splitting factors are influenced by the various ambient environment such as Nakagami-m factor and geometric gains representing the distances between nodes.