Performance of Full Duplex Relaying with Dual
Antenna and Soft Combining
Risheek Bahuguna1 , Shruti Jain2
Dept. of Communication Engineering
SENSE, VIT, Vellore, India
1
risheekbahuguna@gmail.com
2 3
jain20shruti@gmail.com
Abstract—The performance of a full-duplex (FD) relaying
system is investigated in this paper. The relay is equipped with
two antennas (both are trans-receiver). The energy constrained
relay is powered by RF energy harvesting. A time-switching
architecture is adopted to make communication between a
source and a destination. Information received at the
destination from both the trans-receiver is combined using a
soft combining technique, i.e., Maximal Ratio Combining
(MRC). The performance of two protocols, decode-and-
forward (DF) relaying and amplify-and-forward (AF), are also
studied and compared. It is found that use of double antenna
instead of single antenna based transmission at the relay
improves the performance significantly. The impact of MRC
on the throughput performance is noticeable.
Index Terms—full-duplex relaying, dual-hop systems,
energy harvesting, MRC, throughput.
I. INTRODUCTION
In wireless communication, relay based communication has
evolved as a useful solution while the distance between a
source and a destination is large and communication channel is
faded [1-3] . In relay based communication, a relay node is
powered by a battery [4]. In order to maintain the network
connectivity of the conventional communication systems,
periodic recharging or replacement of battery is required which
is not only expensive but also inconvenient. In such scenario
energy harvesting scheme helps an energy constrained relay
node to a great extent [4]. In energy harvesting, energy is
accumulated in a battery from external sources such radio
frequency (RF) signal, wind, vibration, and solar, etc [5-6].
Now a days energy harvesting based wireless communication
becomes an interesting point of research since it gives a cost
effective solution to increase the lifetime of wireless
communication systems.
At present time the research interest moves toward the
simultaneous wireless energy and information transfer
(SWEIT) and a RF signal is capable of carrying both
Amitesh Das3 and Abhijit Bhowmick 4
3
Dept. of ECE, BCET, Durgapur, India
4Dept. of Communication Engineering
SENSE, VIT University, Vellore
amitesh.engg84@gmail.com
4
abx_abhi99@yahoo.com
information and energy simultaneously [7-8]. In [8],
authors proposed time-switching and power-splitting
techniques in connection with SWIET. The performance of
amplify and forward (AF) based relaying is studied in [9] while
the performance of decode-and-forward (DF) relaying
system is studied in [10]. Full-duplex (FD) relaying is
spectrally efficient as compared to half-duplex (HD) relaying
[11]. In [4], the throughput and outage performance of FD
relaying is studied and compared the same with HD relaying.
Motivated by the work done in [4], the performance of a FD
relay based wireless network is studied. The energy
constrained relay node is powered by RF energy harvesting.
The relay node is equipped with two trans-receiver which are
initially harvests energy before information transmission. To
combat with fading, both the trans-receiver forward the same
information to the destination and combined using MRC. The
performance is investigated in terms of throughput for several
network parameters such as transmitting SNR, number of
antennas in relay, relaying protocols (AF and DF) etc. A novel
analytical expression for throughput is developed. The main
contributions of the paper are summarized as follows:
• The performance of a dual antenna based FD relaying is
studied.
• A novel analytical expression of throughput is developed.
• The throughput performance of AF and DF protocol
under the considered wireless relay network is studied
and compared.
• The throughput performance of a single antenna based
relaying and dual antenna based relaying is studied and
compared.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
system model of FD relaying is discussed and followed by
the analytical development of throughput. Simulation results
are discussed in Section III; finally, the conclusions are
made in Section IV.
 a) Energy harvesting at the relay antennas
II. System Model
Both the relay antennas harvest energy from RF source
signal. They harvests for αT amount of time. Thus, the
A dual-hop FD relaying system is considered in Fig. 1, energy harvested by each antenna is given by,
where a source sends a message (information signal) to the
destination via an intermediate relay since the distance 2
between source and destination is large. The source and Pse hsr ,i T
Ei  (1)
destination are equipped with single antenna and the relay is dm
equipped with two antennas ( A1 and A2 ). Time-sharing where i = 1, and 2. While i = 1, the energy E1 is harvested
protocol is adopted for communication between source and 
destination [4]. A hybrid strategy, i.e., a combination of at A1 . Similarly, E 2 is harvested at A2 and is the
SIMO and MISO, is used to make the communication energy conversion parameter.
performance more efficient. There are two hops: first hop
(source to relay) and second hop (relay to destination). The b) Signal Transmission between source and destination
distance between source to relay is d1 and the distance The received signal at the relay can be described as,
between relay to destination is d2. To make the analysis
simple, d1= d2= d is considered. In first hop, SIMO strategy  hsr1 x s (t )
is used and in the second hop, MISO strategy is used. At the
  hL 21 x r 2 (t )  nr (t )
destination Maximal Ratio Combining is used to combat the d m A1
link fading. It is also considered that the relay is equipped y r (1, 2 ) (t )  
h x (t )
with a battery which has limited power supply, and relies on  sr 2 s  hL12 x r1 (t )  nr (t ) A2
external charging through energy harvesting from the RF  d m
source signal.
(2)

where xs (t ) is source signal, yr (1, 2 ) (t ) represents the

hr 21 A1
relay received signals at antenna 1 ( A1 ) and antenna 2 (
A2 ), d is the distance between source and relay, and m is
hsr1 hrd1 the pathloss exponent. Here, hsr1 and hsr 2 are channel
coefficients of the links exists between source and relay,
nr (t ) represents the AWGN noise with zero mean and
variance  n ,
S R D 2
xr1 (t ) and xr 2 (t ) are transmitted
signals from A1 and A2 to the destination and create a
h sr 2 hrd 2 loopback interference to each other through loopback links
with link coefficients hL12 and hL 21 .
hr12 Relay is aware about its own transmit signal, thus it applies
A2
interference cancellation method to minimize the loopback
interference. Hence, after interference cancellation, the
received signal at relay can be expressed as,
Fig.1 Proposed model
 hsr1 x s (t )
  hL 21 x r 2 (t )  nr (t )
m A1
y r (1, 2 ) (t )   d
In the proposed model, both the relay antennas harvest
energy, received the message signal and transmitted the
h x (t )
same to the destination. It is assumed that the all the links  sr 2 s  hL12 x r1 (t )  nr (t ) A2
are Rayleigh faded.  d m
It is considered that T be the total time period required to (3)
complete the communication between source and
destination out of which the first αT amount of time is used where hL 21 and hL12 represent the residual loopback
for harvesting of RF energy at the relay and rest (1- α)T interference.
amount of time is used for information transmission. During
αT period, the source transmits a RF signal (not information Two relaying protocols (AF and DF) have investigated in
the present paper. The relay amplifies the received signal by
signal), x se (t ) , for feeding and storing energy at the relay
a factor  i and forward to the destination with AF protocol

harvester, Pse  E x se (t )
2
. [4].
 Pr , i combination of  2 , 1 and  2 , 2 . The SNR  2 , 1
i 
hsr , i
2
Pse / d m
 hL i j
2
Pr , i   2
(4) indicates the SNR of first hop of link-2,
n 2
Ps hsr 2
where i  1, 2 , j  1, 2 , i  j , Pse  E x se (t )  2
  2,1 
d m  Pr ,1 hL12

2
  n2 

. The SNR of second hop of

Ei  hsr1 i 1 2
and Pr , i  . Here, hsr ,i   . In Pr , 2 hrd 2
1    T hsr 2 i2 link-2,  2 , 2  . Thus, end to end SNR can be
 n2
the case of DF relaying, a relay decodes the received
message, regenerates and retransmits it. Thus, for both type described as,
2
of relaying, the relay transmit signal from i-th antenna can
be expressed as [4],  e 2e    i (8)
i 1

 i y r (1, 2) (t ) AF protocol For AF protocol, SNR of link-1 and link-2 can be defined
 as,
x r , i (t )   Pr
 P x (t ) DF protocol  i ,1 i , 2
 s i  (9)
(5)  i ,1   i , 2   n2
Both the antennas at relay forward the received information where i =1, 2.
to the destination which are combined using MRC diversity.
Thus, the received signal at the destination can be described For DF protocol, SNR of link-1 and link-2 can be defined
as [4] as,

 i  min i ,1 ,  i , 2 
2
y d (t )   wi x r , i  t   nd , i (t ) (10)
i 1 (6)
where i =1, 2.
2 2
where w1  hrd 1 and w2  hrd 2 . The AWGN II. NUMERICAL RESULTS
noise, nd , i (t ) , is added with the forwarded information In this section, simulation results for the proposed dual
between relay to destination. For simplicity, it is assumed antenna based FD relaying model are studied. A simulation
that both nd , i (t ) and n r (t ) have same mean and test bed is developed in MATLAB based on the above
variance. analysis. The performance of the network has been
investigated in terms of throughput for d = 1,  = 0.4, α =
0.1,  n = 1and m = 3. In results, Ps / N 0 is transmitting
2
c) System Throughput
Now, we focus on the throughput of the system. The
SNR where N 0   n .
2
throughput of the system is given by

R
1    log1   
(7)
2
e 2e In Fig.2, network throughput is shown as a function of
transmitting SNR for AF protocol. It is observed that as the
where  e 2 e is the end to end SNR. In the considered
transmitting SNR increases, the throughput for both the
system model, there are two links. The SNR of link-1 scenarios (proposed and existing) increases. It is also found
(source-A1-destination) is considered as  1 and similarly that for a particular transmitting SNR the throughput for
the SNR of link-2 (source-A2-destination) is considered as proposed model outperforms the existing one.
 2 . The link SNRs  1 and  2 depend on the protocol
adopted at relay. Here,  1 is a combination of  1, 1 and
 1, 2 . The SNR  1, 1 indicates the SNR for first hop of
2
Ps hsr1
link-1,  1,1  and
d m  Pr , 2 hL 21   n2 
2

 

Ps  E x s (t )
2
 . The SNR of second hop of link-1 is
2
Pr ,1 hrd 1
 1, 2  . Similarly, the SNR  2 is a
 n2

Fig.2: Impact of transmitting SNR on throughput for AF protocol
Fig.3: Impact of transmitting SNR on throughput for DF Protocol
In Fig.3, network throughput is shown as a function of
transmitting SNR for DF protocol. It is observed that the
throughput for proposed model outperforms the existing
one.
Fig.4, shows the variation of throughput for different
protocols. It is observed the DF protocol outperforms the AF
protocol for a particular transmitting SNR as well as energy
conversion parameter (  ). It is also observed that for a
particular transmitting SNR, if the value of  increases, the
network throughput improves.
Fig.4: Throughput analysis for different protocols
III. CONCLUSION
The performance of a dual antenna based Full Duplex
Relaying is investigated. The relay node is equipped with
dual antennas which can receive, transmit information as
well as harvest energy. In this paper, RF harvesting is
considered only. The energy constrained relay node harvests
energy from RF signal of source. A soft combining
technique (MRC) is used for combining the data at the
destination. The performance of considered network model
is investigated in terms of throughput. A novel analytical
expression of throughput is developed. It is found MRC has
a significant impact on throughput performance. The
throughput of the network improves as the transmitting SNR
and the value of energy conversion parameter increases.
REFERENCES
[1] Tuan Do and Brian L. Mark, “Combining Cooperative Relaying
with Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks,” IEEE conference on
Radio and wireless symposium, pp. 224-227, 2010.
[2] Nagina Zarin, Imran Khan and Sadaqqat Jan, “Relay Based
Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks over
Nakagami Fading Channes,” IJMSE, vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 54-58, April 2012.
[3] Liangjun Zhang, Jie Yang and Xiongjun Jian, “Optimization of Relay-
based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Networks,”
WiCOM-2011, pp. 1-4, 23-25 Sept. 2011.
[4] C. Zhong, H. A. Suraweera, G. Zheng, I. Krikidis and Z. Zhang,
"Wireless Information and Power Transfer With Full Duplex
Relaying," in IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 62, no.
10, pp. 3447-3461, Oct. 2014.
[5] M. Pinuela, P. Mitcheson, and S. Lucyszyn, “Ambient RF en ergy
har-vesting in urban and semi-urban environments,” IEEE Trans.
Microwave Theory and Techniques, vol. 61, no. 7, pp. 2715–2726,
Jul. 2013
[6] Abhijit Bhowmick, Sanjay Dhar Roy, Sumit Kundu, “Cognitive
radio network with continuous energy‐harvesting ,” International Journal of
Communication Systems, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 1-11, 2017.
[7] W. Lumpkins, “Nikola Tesla's dream relaized: Wireless power
energy harvesting,” IEEE Consumer Electronics Mag., vol. 3, no.1
, pp. 39–42, Jan. 2014.
[8] R. Zhang and C. Ho, “MIMO broadcasting for simultaneous w ireless
information and power transfer,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol.
12, no. 5, pp. 1989–2001, May 2013.
[9] A. A. Nasir, X. Zhou, S. Durrani, R. A. Kennedy, “Relaying
protocols for wireless energy harvesting and information processing,”
IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun.., vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 3622-3636, 2013.
[10] A. A. Nasir, X. Zhou, S. Durrani, R. A. Kennedy, “Wireless
energy harvesting and information relaying: Adaptive time-switching
protocols and throughput analysis,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun..,.
[11] T. Phu Do, Y. H. Kim , “Outage-Optimal power and Time
Allocation for Rate-Aware Two-Way Relaying With a Decode-
and-Forward Protocol ,” IEEE Trans. On Vehicular Commu.,
vol. 65, no. 12, pp. 9673-9686, 2016.