On the Stability of Random Multiple Access with Stochastic Energy Harvesting

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the exact stability region of energy-harvesting nodes sharing a wireless channel with multipacket reception, considering stochastic energy and packet arrivals, and examines the effect of finite battery capacity.

Contribution

It provides a precise stability region characterization for energy-harvesting nodes with MPR channels, including finite battery effects, a novel analysis in this context.

Findings

Exact stability region derived for two energy-harvesting nodes with MPR

Finite battery capacity reduces the stability region

Results generalize to unlimited energy scenarios

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the random access of nodes having energy harvesting capability and a battery to store the harvested energy. Each node attempts to transmit the head-of-line packet in the queue if its battery is nonempty. The packet and energy arrivals into the queue and the battery are all modeled as a discrete-time stochastic process. The main contribution of this paper is the exact characterization of the stability region of the packet queues given the energy harvesting rates when a pair of nodes are randomly accessing a common channel having multipacket reception (MPR) capability. The channel with MPR capability is a generalized form of the wireless channel modeling which allows probabilistic receptions of the simultaneously transmitted packets. The results obtained in this paper are fairly general as the cases with unlimited energy for transmissions both with the collision channel and the channel with MPR capability can be derived from ours as special cases. Furthermore, we study the impact of the finiteness of the batteries on the achievable stability region.