Trading Wireless Information and Power Transfer: Relay Selection to Minimize the Outage Probability

This paper studies the outage probability minimization problem for a multiple relay network with energy harvesting constraints. The relays are hybrid nodes used for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer from the source radio frequency (RF) signals. There is a trade-off associated with the amount of time a relay node is used for energy and information transfer. Large intervals of information transfer implies little time for energy harvesting from RF signals and thus, high probability of outage events. We propose relay selection schemes for a cooperative system with a fixed number of RF powered relays. We address both causal and non-causal channel state information cases at the relay--destination link and evaluate the trade-off associated with information/power transfer in the context of minimization of outage probability.Comment: IEEE GlobalSiP, 201

Energy Harvesting Networks with General Utility Functions: Near Optimal Online Policies

We consider online scheduling policies for single-user energy harvesting communication systems, where the goal is to characterize online policies that maximize the long term average utility, for some general concave and monotonically increasing utility function. In our setting, the transmitter relies on energy harvested from nature to send its messages to the receiver, and is equipped with a finite-sized battery to store its energy. Energy packets are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) over time slots, and are revealed causally to the transmitter. Only the average arrival rate is known a priori. We first characterize the optimal solution for the case of Bernoulli arrivals. Then, for general i.i.d. arrivals, we first show that fixed fraction policies [Shaviv-Ozgur] are within a constant multiplicative gap from the optimal solution for all energy arrivals and battery sizes. We then derive a set of sufficient conditions on the utility function to guarantee that fixed fraction policies are within a constant additive gap as well from the optimal solution.Comment: To appear in the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1705.1030

On Information and Energy Cooperation in Energy Harvesting Cognitive Radio

This paper considers the cooperation between primary and secondary users at information and energy levels when both users are energy harvesting nodes. In particular, a secondary transmitter helps relaying the primary message, and in turn, gains the spectrum access as a reward. Also, the primary transmitter supplies energy to the secondary transmitter if the latter is energy-constrained, which facilitates an uninterrupted cooperation. We address this two-level cooperation over a finite horizon with the finite battery constraint at the secondary transmitter. While promising the rate-guaranteed service to both primary and secondary users, we aim to maximize the primary rate. We develop an iterative algorithm that obtains the optimal offline power policies for primary and secondary users. To acquire insights about the structure of the optimal solution, we examine specific scenarios. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of the secondary rate constraint and finite battery on the primary rate and the probability of cooperation. We show that the joint information and energy cooperation increases the chances of cooperation and achieves significant rate gains over only information cooperation.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, to be presented in IEEE PIMRC 201