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

Cognitive and Energy Harvesting-Based D2D Communication in Cellular Networks: Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis

While cognitive radio enables spectrum-efficient wireless communication, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting from ambient interference is an enabler for energy-efficient wireless communication. In this paper, we model and analyze cognitive and energy harvesting-based D2D communication in cellular networks. The cognitive D2D transmitters harvest energy from ambient interference and use one of the channels allocated to cellular users (in uplink or downlink), which is referred to as the D2D channel, to communicate with the corresponding receivers. We investigate two spectrum access policies for cellular communication in the uplink or downlink, namely, random spectrum access (RSA) policy and prioritized spectrum access (PSA) policy. In RSA, any of the available channels including the channel used by the D2D transmitters can be selected randomly for cellular communication, while in PSA the D2D channel is used only when all of the other channels are occupied. A D2D transmitter can communicate successfully with its receiver only when it harvests enough energy to perform channel inversion toward the receiver, the D2D channel is free, and the $\mathsf{SINR}$ at the receiver is above the required threshold; otherwise, an outage occurs for the D2D communication. We use tools from stochastic geometry to evaluate the performance of the proposed communication system model with general path-loss exponent in terms of outage probability for D2D and cellular users. We show that energy harvesting can be a reliable alternative to power cognitive D2D transmitters while achieving acceptable performance. Under the same $\mathsf{SINR}$ outage requirements as for the non-cognitive case, cognitive channel access improves the outage probability for D2D users for both the spectrum access policies.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Communications, to appea