Energy Harvesting Cooperative Networks: Is the Max-Min Criterion Still Diversity-Optimal?

This paper considers a general energy harvesting cooperative network with M source-destination (SD) pairs and one relay, where the relay schedules only m user pairs for transmissions. For the special case of m = 1, the addressed scheduling problem is equivalent to relay selection for the scenario with one SD pair and M relays. In conventional cooperative networks, the max-min selection criterion has been recognized as a diversity-optimal strategy for relay selection and user scheduling. The main contribution of this paper is to show that the use of the max-min criterion will result in loss of diversity gains in energy harvesting cooperative networks. Particularly when only a single user is scheduled, analytical results are developed to demonstrate that the diversity gain achieved by the max-min criterion is only (M+1)/2, much less than the maximal diversity gain M. The max-min criterion suffers this diversity loss because it does not reflect the fact that the source-relay channels are more important than the relay-destination channels in energy harvesting networks. Motivated by this fact, a few user scheduling approaches tailored to energy harvesting networks are developed and their performance is analyzed. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the accuracy of the developed analytical results and facilitate the performance comparison.