In this thesis, I focus on the system design and performance analysis of wireless communication networks with radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting. Battery re-placement/recharging has always been a challenging issue in wireless communication networks, especially in large-scale networks like wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Recently, RF energy harvesting (EH) technology has been developed as a new viable solution to extend the lifetime of wireless networks via enabling wireless devices to harvest energy from RF signals. Inspired by this technique, wireless-powered communication networks (WPCNs) have attracted an upsurge of research interest. According to the protocols proposed in current literature, an EH user will exhaust all the energy it harvests straightway during this transmission block. This may be a sub-optimal solution, since this little amount of energy may not be able to contribute to an effective transmission. Therefore, in this thesis, I consider energy accumulation at each EH node by providing an energy storage (e.g. a rechargeable battery), so that it can an accumulate sufficient amount of harvested energy before transmission and wait to transmit in an appropriate time slot. To begin with, I first investigate wireless energy harvesting (WEH) technique in cooperative communication networks where the source and relay can both communicate with the destination. I refer to this kind of network as wireless-powered cooperative communication networks (WPCCNs). This WEH technique offers a new cooperation manner for wireless devices since the relay node is now able to harvest energy from the source’s information. In this thesis, I consider the relay as a wireless-powered node that has no external power supply; but it is equipped with an EH unit and a rechargeable battery so that it can harvest and accumulate energy from RF signals broadcast by the source. By fully incorporating the EH feature of the relay, an opportunistic relaying protocol was developed, termed accumulate-then-forward (ATF), for the ...