Analysis of Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with Time Splitting Wireless Energy Harvesting

With growing demand to use wireless networks and diverse data intensive applications, Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) are becoming key enablers for higher data throughput. HetNets often comprise of Macrocell Base Station (MBS) with multiple Macrocell Users (MUs) and an extensive array of Femtocell Base Stations (FBSs) with many femtocell users (FUs). The femtocells play a vital role in facilitating the transmission of uplink or downlink traffic between the MUs and MBS. With ultra-dense deployment of small femtocells, the energy requirements of the electronic equipment have also increased. This paper investigates the performance of Wireless Energy Harvesting (EH) for two tier heterogeneous network using time splitting EH technique. In particular, MUs and femtocells of HetNets are designed to harvest wireless energy from the RF signal transmitted by the MBS. With this harvested energy, femtocells seize the transmission opportunity to transmit the data of their connected users. We derive the mathematical expressions for the outage probability and throughput of the femtocell user. We use the time switching protocol for EH. The simulation results are presented by varying the EH duration and base station power. Our simulation results show that there is an optimal value of EH duration for which the outage is minimal and throughput maximizes.