Proportional Fair Resource Allocation on an Energy Harvesting Downlink - Part I: Structure

TL;DR

This paper develops a biconvex optimization framework for proportionally fair resource allocation in energy harvesting downlink systems, optimizing time, power, and rate allocations within a frame.

Contribution

It introduces a BCD-based algorithm to solve the biconvex problem, ensuring convergence to an optimal solution for fair and efficient resource allocation.

Findings

BCD algorithm converges to optimal solutions.

Power-time allocations balance throughput and fairness.

Structural analysis reveals multiple optima in the problem.

Abstract

This paper considers the allocation of time slots in a frame, as well as power and rate to multiple receivers on an energy harvesting downlink. Energy arrival times that will occur within the frame are known at the beginning of the frame. The goal is to optimize throughput in a proportionally fair way, taking into account the inherent differences of channel quality among users. Analysis of structural characteristics of the problem reveals that it can be formulated as a biconvex optimization problem, and that it has multiple optima. Due to the biconvex nature of the problem, a Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) based optimization algorithm that converges to an optimal solution is presented. Numerical and simulation results show that the power-time allocations found by BCD achieve a good balance between total throughput and fairness.