Long term Throughput and Approximate Capacity of Transmitter-Receiver Energy Harvesting Channel with Fading

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the long-term throughput and capacity of energy harvesting channels with fading, providing bounds and approximations for systems where either one or both ends harvest energy, highlighting the complexity and specific bounds in such scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces bounds and approximation methods for the capacity and throughput of energy harvesting channels with fading, including a special case with unit batteries for both transmitter and receiver.

Findings

Bounded the optimal long-term throughput for certain energy arrival distributions.

Provided a constant approximation to the channel capacity with fading.

Identified a universal bound for the case with unit batteries at both transmitter and receiver.

Abstract

We first consider an energy harvesting channel with fading, where only the transmitter harvests energy from natural sources. We bound the optimal long term throughput by a constant for a class of energy arrival distributions. The proposed method also gives a constant approximation to the capacity of the energy harvesting channel with fading. Next, we consider a more general system where both the transmitter and the receiver employ energy harvesting to power themselves. In this case, we show that finding an approximation to the optimal long term throughput is far more difficult, and identify a special case of unit battery capacity at both the transmitter and the receiver for which we obtain a universal bound on the ratio of the upper and lower bound on the long term throughput.