Competitive analysis of energy harvesting wireless communication systems

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.A competitive analysis for the online and offline optimization problems for a slotted energy harvesting (EH) wireless communication system is studied. The objective is to design online strategies that minimize the competitive rate gap that is defined as the maximum gap between the optimal rates that can be achieved by the offline and online policies over all possible energy arrival profiles. It is shown that the competitive rate gap is upper-bounded by the logarithm of the number of slots, and a myopic online transmission policy is proposed that achieves a lower rate gap.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

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 harvest-use-store design for delay-constrained energy harvesting wireless communications

Recent advances in energy harvesting (EH) technology have motivated the adoption of rechargeable mobile devices for communications. In this paper, we consider a point-to-point (P2P) wireless communication system in which an EH transmitter with a non-ideal rechargeable battery is required to send a given fixed number of bits to the receiver before they expire according to a preset delay constraint. Due to the possible energy loss in the storage process, the harvest-use-and-store (HUS) architecture is adopted. We characterize the properties of the optimal solutions, for additive white Gaussian channels (AWGNs) and then block-fading channels, that maximize the energy efficiency (i.e., battery residual) subject to a given rate requirement. Interestingly, it is shown that the optimal solution has a water-filling interpretation with double thresholds and that both thresholds are monotonic. Based on this, we investigate the optimal double-threshold based allocation policy and devise an algorithm to achieve the solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the theoretical analysis and to compare the optimal solutions with existing schemes