  This paper studies user cooperation in the emerging wireless powered
communication network (WPCN) for throughput optimization. For the purpose of
exposition, we consider a two-user WPCN, in which one hybrid access point
(H-AP) broadcasts wireless energy to two distributed users in the downlink (DL)
and the users transmit their independent information using their individually
harvested energy to the H-AP in the uplink (UL) through
time-division-multiple-access (TDMA). We propose user cooperation in the WPCN
where the user which is nearer to the H-AP and has a better channel for DL
energy harvesting and UL information transmission uses part of its allocated UL
time and DL harvested energy to help to relay the far user's information to the
H-AP, in order to achieve more balanced throughput optimization. We maximize
the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of the two users by jointly optimizing the time and
power allocations in the network for both wireless energy transfer in the DL
and wireless information transmission and relaying in the UL. Simulation
results show that the proposed user cooperation scheme can effectively improve
the achievable throughput in the WPCN with desired user fairness.
