Cost minimization for fading channels with energy harvesting and conventional energy

In this paper, we investigate resource allocation strategies for a point-to-point wireless communications system with hybrid energy sources consisting of an energy harvester and a conventional energy source. In particular, as an incentive to promote the use of renewable energy, we assume that the renewable energy has a lower cost than the conventional energy. Then, by assuming that the non-causal information of the energy arrivals and the channel power gains are available, we minimize the total energy cost of such a system over $N$ fading slots under a proposed outage constraint together with the energy harvesting constraints. The outage constraint requires a minimum fixed number of slots to be reliably decoded, and thus leads to a mixed-integer programming formulation for the optimization problem. This constraint is useful, for example, if an outer code is used to recover all the data bits. Optimal linear time algorithms are obtained for two extreme cases, i.e., the number of outage slot is $1$ or $N-1$. For the general case, a lower bound based on the linear programming relaxation, and two suboptimal algorithms are proposed. It is shown that the proposed suboptimal algorithms exhibit only a small gap from the lower bound. We then extend the proposed algorithms to the multi-cycle scenario in which the outage constraint is imposed for each cycle separately. Finally, we investigate the resource allocation strategies when only causal information on the energy arrivals and only channel statistics is available. It is shown that the greedy energy allocation is optimal for this scenario.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Optimal Energy Allocation for Kalman Filtering over Packet Dropping Links with Imperfect Acknowledgments and Energy Harvesting Constraints

This paper presents a design methodology for optimal transmission energy allocation at a sensor equipped with energy harvesting technology for remote state estimation of linear stochastic dynamical systems. In this framework, the sensor measurements as noisy versions of the system states are sent to the receiver over a packet dropping communication channel. The packet dropout probabilities of the channel depend on both the sensor's transmission energies and time varying wireless fading channel gains. The sensor has access to an energy harvesting source which is an everlasting but unreliable energy source compared to conventional batteries with fixed energy storages. The receiver performs optimal state estimation with random packet dropouts to minimize the estimation error covariances based on received measurements. The receiver also sends packet receipt acknowledgments to the sensor via an erroneous feedback communication channel which is itself packet dropping. The objective is to design optimal transmission energy allocation at the energy harvesting sensor to minimize either a finite-time horizon sum or a long term average (infinite-time horizon) of the trace of the expected estimation error covariance of the receiver's Kalman filter. These problems are formulated as Markov decision processes with imperfect state information. The optimal transmission energy allocation policies are obtained by the use of dynamic programming techniques. Using the concept of submodularity, the structure of the optimal transmission energy policies are studied. Suboptimal solutions are also discussed which are far less computationally intensive than optimal solutions. Numerical simulation results are presented illustrating the performance of the energy allocation algorithms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.663

Power Allocation for Conventional and Buffer-Aided Link Adaptive Relaying Systems with Energy Harvesting Nodes

Energy harvesting (EH) nodes can play an important role in cooperative communication systems which do not have a continuous power supply. In this paper, we consider the optimization of conventional and buffer-aided link adaptive EH relaying systems, where an EH source communicates with the destination via an EH decode-and-forward relay. In conventional relaying, source and relay transmit signals in consecutive time slots whereas in buffer-aided link adaptive relaying, the state of the source-relay and relay-destination channels determines whether the source or the relay is selected for transmission. Our objective is to maximize the system throughput over a finite number of transmission time slots for both relaying protocols. In case of conventional relaying, we propose an offline and several online joint source and relay transmit power allocation schemes. For offline power allocation, we formulate an optimization problem which can be solved optimally. For the online case, we propose a dynamic programming (DP) approach to compute the optimal online transmit power. To alleviate the complexity inherent to DP, we also propose several suboptimal online power allocation schemes. For buffer-aided link adaptive relaying, we show that the joint offline optimization of the source and relay transmit powers along with the link selection results in a mixed integer non-linear program which we solve optimally using the spatial branch-and-bound method. We also propose an efficient online power allocation scheme and a naive online power allocation scheme for buffer-aided link adaptive relaying. Our results show that link adaptive relaying provides performance improvement over conventional relaying at the expense of a higher computational complexity.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

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