Video multicast cooperative communication in 5G systems with radio frequency energy harvesting

In this paper, the performance of radio frequency energy harvesting cooperative multicast communication is analyzed in terms of outage probability. The multicast communication between base station (BS) and multiple destinations is assisted by one energy harvesting relay chosen from multiple energy harvesting relays. The relays harvest energy from the BS transmissions to be able to transmit for cooperation. We propose two power splitting approaches at the relays for energy harvesting. The first approach splits the received signal at the relays into two portions and send them to decoding/energy harvesting circuitry, simultaneously. In the second approach, the received signal during any receiving time is either sent to the information decoding circuitry or energy harvesting circuitry depending on the strength of the received signal. Analytical expressions of outage probability for these two power splitting approaches are derived. The derived expressions are validated by comparing them with the simulation results. Further, the outage probability of our proposed energy harvesting cooperative multicast system is almost equal to the non-energy harvesting cooperative multicast system.