Information Capacity of an Energy Harvesting Sensor Node

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the Shannon capacity of an energy harvesting sensor node communicating over an AWGN channel, linking energy management policies with queueing theory for reliable green communication.

Contribution

It provides a novel capacity characterization for energy harvesting sensor nodes considering practical energy models, bridging information theory and queueing theory.

Findings

Capacity expression for energy harvesting sensor nodes

Connection between energy management and queueing policies

Insights into reliable communication with stochastic energy sources

Abstract

Energy harvesting sensor nodes are gaining popularity due to their ability to improve the network life time and are becoming a preferred choice supporting 'green communication'. In this paper we focus on communicating reliably over an AWGN channel using such an energy harvesting sensor node. An important part of this work involves appropriate modeling of the energy harvesting, as done via various practical architectures. Our main result is the characterization of the Shannon capacity of the communication system. The key technical challenge involves dealing with the dynamic (and stochastic) nature of the (quadratic) cost of the input to the channel. As a corollary, we find close connections between the capacity achieving energy management policies and the queueing theoretic throughput optimal policies.