A stochastic geometry analysis of cooperative wireless networks powered by energy harvesting

Energy harvesting technology is essential for enabling green, sustainable and autonomous wireless networks. In this report, a large-scale wireless network with energy harvesting transmitters is considered, where a group of transmitters forms a cluster to cooperatively serve a desired user in the presence of co-channel interference and noise. Using stochastic geometry, simple closed-form expressions are derived to characterize the outage performance at the user as a function of important parameters such as the energy harvesting rate, the energy buffer size and the cluster size for a given cluster geometry. The analysis is further extended to characterize the delay due to transmission failure. The developed framework is flexible in that it allows the in-cluster transmitters to have possibly different energy harvesting capabilities. The analytical expressions are first validated using simulations and then used for investigating the impact of different parameters such as cluster and buffer size on outage performance. The results suggest that substantial outage performance can in fact be extracted with a relatively small energy buffer. Moreover, the utility of having a large energy buffer increases with the cluster size as well as with the energy harvesting rate.