Performance analysis of energy-harvesting-aware multi-relay networks in Nakagami-m fading

This paper investigates the outage performance of an energy-harvesting(EH) relay-aided cooperative network, where the source node transmits information to its destination node with the help of multiple energy-harvesting cooperative nodes. For such a system, we derive an explicit closed-form expression of outage probability over Nakagami-m fading channels, where the on-off EH model is considered. We simulate the explicit closed-form expression of outage probability with different parameters compared with the related Monte Carlo method. It is shown that the simulation results match well with the numerical ones, which demonstrates the correctness of our theoretical analysis. It indicates that to evaluate the system outage performance, our theoretical results can be applied without running the complex Monte Carlo simulation. Via simulations, it is observed that the system outage performance will be improved when natural source EH relays are employed. Besides, more relays, better system performance.