430 research outputs found
Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: A Review of Recent Advances
This article summarizes recent contributions in the broad area of energy
harvesting wireless communications. In particular, we provide the current state
of the art for wireless networks composed of energy harvesting nodes, starting
from the information-theoretic performance limits to transmission scheduling
policies and resource allocation, medium access and networking issues. The
emerging related area of energy transfer for self-sustaining energy harvesting
wireless networks is considered in detail covering both energy cooperation
aspects and simultaneous energy and information transfer. Various potential
models with energy harvesting nodes at different network scales are reviewed as
well as models for energy consumption at the nodes.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications
(Special Issue: Wireless Communications Powered by Energy Harvesting and
Wireless Energy Transfer
Communicating Using an Energy Harvesting Transmitter: Optimum Policies Under Energy Storage Losses
In this paper, short-term throughput optimal power allocation policies are
derived for an energy harvesting transmitter with energy storage losses. In
particular, the energy harvesting transmitter is equipped with a battery that
loses a fraction of its stored energy. Both single user, i.e. one
transmitter-one receiver, and the broadcast channel, i.e., one
transmitter-multiple receiver settings are considered, initially with an
infinite capacity battery. It is shown that the optimal policies for these
models are threshold policies. Specifically, storing energy when harvested
power is above an upper threshold, retrieving energy when harvested power is
below a lower threshold, and transmitting with the harvested energy in between
is shown to maximize the weighted sum-rate. It is observed that the two
thresholds are related through the storage efficiency of the battery, and are
nondecreasing during the transmission. The results are then extended to the
case with finite battery capacity, where it is shown that a similar
double-threshold structure arises but the thresholds are no longer monotonic. A
dynamic program that yields an optimal online power allocation is derived, and
is shown to have a similar double-threshold structure. A simpler online policy
is proposed and observed to perform close to the optimal policy.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, August
201
Broadcasting with an Energy Harvesting Rechargeable Transmitter
In this paper, we investigate the transmission completion time minimization
problem in a two-user additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) broadcast channel,
where the transmitter is able to harvest energy from the nature, using a
rechargeable battery. The harvested energy is modeled to arrive at the
transmitter randomly during the course of transmissions. The transmitter has a
fixed number of packets to be delivered to each receiver. Our goal is to
minimize the time by which all of the packets for both users are delivered to
their respective destinations. To this end, we optimize the transmit powers and
transmission rates intended for both users. We first analyze the structural
properties of the optimal transmission policy. We prove that the optimal total
transmit power has the same structure as the optimal single-user transmit
power. We also prove that there exists a cut-off power level for the stronger
user. If the optimal total transmit power is lower than this cut-off level, all
transmit power is allocated to the stronger user, and when the optimal total
transmit power is larger than this cut-off level, all transmit power above this
level is allocated to the weaker user. Based on these structural properties of
the optimal policy, we propose an algorithm that yields the globally optimal
off-line scheduling policy. Our algorithm is based on the idea of reducing the
two-user broadcast channel problem into a single-user problem as much as
possible.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, October
201
Data retrieval time for energy harvesting wireless sensors
We consider the problem of retrieving a reliable estimate of an attribute monitored by a wireless sensor network, where the sensors harvest energy from the environment independently, at random. Each sensor stores the harvested energy in batteries of limited capacity. Moreover, provided they have sufficient energy, the sensors broadcast their measurements in a decentralized fashion. Clients arrive at the sensor network according to a Poisson process and are interested in retrieving a fixed number of sensor measurements, based on which a reliable estimate is computed. We show that the time until an arbitrary sensor broadcasts has a phase-type distribution. Based on this result and the theory of order statistics of phase-type distributions, we determine the probability distribution of the time needed for a client to retrieve a reliable estimate of an attribute monitored by the sensor network. We also provide closed-form expression for the retrieval time of a reliable estimate when the capacity of the sensor battery or the rate at which energy is harvested is asymptotically large. In addition, we analyze numerically the retrieval time of a reliable estimate for various sizes of the sensor network, maximum capacity of the sensor batteries and rate at which energy is harvested. These results show that the energy harvesting rate and the broadcasting rate are the main parameters that influence the retrieval time of a reliable estimate, while deploying sensors with large batteries does not significantly reduce the retrieval time
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