788 research outputs found
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
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
Optimal Save-Then-Transmit Protocol for Energy Harvesting Wireless Transmitters
In this paper, the design of a wireless communication device relying
exclusively on energy harvesting is considered. Due to the inability of
rechargeable energy sources to charge and discharge at the same time, a
constraint we term the energy half-duplex constraint, two rechargeable energy
storage devices (ESDs) are assumed so that at any given time, there is always
one ESD being recharged. The energy harvesting rate is assumed to be a random
variable that is constant over the time interval of interest. A
save-then-transmit (ST) protocol is introduced, in which a fraction of time
{\rho} (dubbed the save-ratio) is devoted exclusively to energy harvesting,
with the remaining fraction 1 - {\rho} used for data transmission. The ratio of
the energy obtainable from an ESD to the energy harvested is termed the energy
storage efficiency, {\eta}. We address the practical case of the secondary ESD
being a battery with {\eta} < 1, and the main ESD being a super-capacitor with
{\eta} = 1. The optimal save-ratio that minimizes outage probability is
derived, from which some useful design guidelines are drawn. In addition, we
compare the outage performance of random power supply to that of constant power
supply over the Rayleigh fading channel. The diversity order with random power
is shown to be the same as that of constant power, but the performance gap can
be large. Furthermore, we extend the proposed ST protocol to wireless networks
with multiple transmitters. It is shown that the system-level outage
performance is critically dependent on the relationship between the number of
transmitters and the optimal save-ratio for single-channel outage minimization.
Numerical results are provided to validate our proposed study.Comment: This is the longer version of a paper to appear in IEEE Transactions
on Wireless Communication
On the Effects of Battery Imperfections in an Energy Harvesting Device
Energy Harvesting allows the devices in a Wireless Sensor Network to recharge
their batteries through environmental energy sources. While in the literature
the main focus is on devices with ideal batteries, in reality several
inefficiencies have to be considered to correctly design the operating regimes
of an Energy Harvesting Device (EHD). In this work we describe how the
throughput optimization problem changes under \emph{real battery} constraints
in an EHD. In particular, we consider imperfect knowledge of the state of
charge of the battery and storage inefficiencies, \emph{i.e.}, part of the
harvested energy is wasted in the battery recharging process. We formulate the
problem as a Markov Decision Process, basing our model on some realistic
observations about transmission, consumption and harvesting power. We find the
performance upper bound with a real battery and numerically discuss the novelty
introduced by the real battery effects. We show that using the \emph{old}
policies obtained without considering the real battery effects is strongly
sub-optimal and may even result in zero throughput.Comment: In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and
Communications, pp. 942-948, Feb. 201
Energy Harvesting Broadband Communication Systems with Processing Energy Cost
Communication over a broadband fading channel powered by an energy harvesting
transmitter is studied. Assuming non-causal knowledge of energy/data arrivals
and channel gains, optimal transmission schemes are identified by taking into
account the energy cost of the processing circuitry as well as the transmission
energy. A constant processing cost for each active sub-channel is assumed.
Three different system objectives are considered: i) throughput maximization,
in which the total amount of transmitted data by a deadline is maximized for a
backlogged transmitter with a finite capacity battery; ii) energy maximization,
in which the remaining energy in an infinite capacity battery by a deadline is
maximized such that all the arriving data packets are delivered; iii)
transmission completion time minimization, in which the delivery time of all
the arriving data packets is minimized assuming infinite size battery. For each
objective, a convex optimization problem is formulated, the properties of the
optimal transmission policies are identified, and an algorithm which computes
an optimal transmission policy is proposed. Finally, based on the insights
gained from the offline optimizations, low-complexity online algorithms
performing close to the optimal dynamic programming solution for the throughput
and energy maximization problems are developed under the assumption that the
energy/data arrivals and channel states are known causally at the transmitter.Comment: published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication
On the impact of mobility on battery-less RF energy harvesting system performance
The future of Internet of Things (IoT) envisions billions of sensors integrated with the physical environment. At the same time, recharging and replacing batteries on this infrastructure could result not only in high maintenance costs, but also large amounts of toxic waste due to the need to dispose of old batteries. Recently, battery-free sensor platforms have been developed that use supercapacitors as energy storage, promising maintenance-free and perpetual sensor operation. While prior work focused on supercapacitor characterization, modelling and supercapacitor-aware scheduling, the impact of mobility on capacitor charging and overall sensor application performance has been largely ignored. We show that supercapacitor size is critical for mobile system performance and that selecting an optimal value is not trivial: small capacitors charge quickly and enable the node to operate in low energy environments, but cannot support intensive tasks such as communication or reprogramming; increasing the capacitor size, on the other hand, enables the support for energy-intensive tasks, but may prevent the node from booting at all if the node navigates in a low energy area. The paper investigates this problem and proposes a hybrid storage solution that uses an adaptive learning algorithm to predict the amount of available ambient energy and dynamically switch between two capacitors depending on the environment. The evaluation based on extensive simulations and prototype measurements showed up to 40% and 80% improvement compared to a fixed-capacitor approach in terms of the amount of harvested energy and sensor coverage
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