Linear and Nonlinear Energy Harvesting in Concurrent Cellular and D2D Communication

ABSTRACT To address the energy requirements of future energy‐constrained wireless nodes, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) can be one of the promising solutions due to the widespread availability of RF energy in the environment. In this study, an interference‐aided dual‐hop cooperative communication scenario is considered, where both cellular and energy‐constrained device‐to‐device (D2D) users coexist and share the same radio resources. The base station communicates with the cellular user via a direct link and an energy‐constrained relay node. The cellular user combines the signals received from both observations by using maximal‐ratio combining. Co‐channel interference signals are exploited as another source of energy in addition to the signal of the source at the energy harvester and can be cancelled at the information decoder of the EH nodes by using interference cancellation techniques. D2D users only harvest energy in the first phase, whereas the D2D transmitter transmits information to its receivers in the second phase with the harvested power. The performance of the proposed model is studied considering both linear and nonlinear EH models employing time‐switching and power‐splitting receiver architectures. Through numerical simulations, it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme achieves an outstanding performance gain compared to the baseline scheme in terms of throughput.