Sum-Throughput Maximization by Power Allocation in WBAN With Relay Cooperation

In this paper, we investigate an energy harvesting wireless body area network (WBAN) with relay cooperation, where the destination nodes and the relay simultaneously harvest energy from the radio frequency (RF) source, then the destination nodes transmit data to the source by maximum ratio combining (MRC) transmission mode. We study the optimal design for relay power splitting ratio in each relaying sub-slot and the destination nodes power allocation to maximize the sum-throughput with the proposed protocol. The optimization problem is divided into two cases, destination node power limit (DPL) case and relay power limit (RPL) case. In essence, the problem is a joint-objective optimization and is solved by the Lagrangian multiplier method. Simulation results show that our proposed optimal method can greatly improve the sum-throughput compared with conventional mean power allocation (MPA) method and mean time allocation (MTA) method. Moreover, a significant sum-throughput promotion is achieved on the RPL case over the DPL case.