Energy efficient antenna selection for a MIMO relay using RF energy harvesting

Abstract

Energy harvesting has emerged as a promising technique which helps to increase the sustainability of wireless networks. In this paper, we consider a network with a single source, single destination and a single relay equipped with multiple antennas. We develop an optimization framework that exploits the energy harvested from the source radio frequency signals with smart antenna selection schemes at the relay node. Our main target is to minimize the source power and the antennas' circuit power jointly subject to quality of service constraints on the rate. To overcome the computational complexity of the optimization problem, we propose two special case schemes, namely Fixed Source Power Antenna Selection (FSP-AS) and All Receive Antenna Selection (AR-AS). Also, we suggest two sub-optimal heuristic schemes with low complexity and compare their performance with the optimization problem solutions numerically. The simulation results show the gain of our optimal scheme in terms of energy efficiency, which can be up to 80% as compared to solutions proposed in the literature. 2016 IEEE.