Performance Analysis of SWIPT Relay Networks with Noncoherent Modulation

In this paper, we investigate the performance of noncoherent modulation in simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) relay networks. Noncoherent modulation schemes eliminate the need for instantaneous channel state information estimation, and therefore, minimize the overall energy consumption of the network. In particular, we adopt a moments-based approach to develop a comprehensive novel analytical framework for the analysis of the outage probability, achievable throughput, and average symbol error rate (ASER) of a dual-hop SWIPT relay system considering the time switching (TS) and power splitting (PS) receiver architectures. In addition, through the derivation of new asymptotic analytical results for the outage probability and ASER, we analytically demonstrate that the diversity order of the considered system is non-integer less than 1 in the high signal-to-noise (SNR) regime. Our results show that there is a unique value for the PS ratio that minimizes the outage probability of the system, while this is not the case for the TS protocol. We also demonstrate that, in terms of system throughput, the TS relaying scheme is superior to the PS relaying scheme at lower SNR values. An extensive Monte Carlo simulation study is presented to corroborate the proposed analytical model.