A General Utility Optimization Framework for Energy Harvesting Based Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive optimization framework for energy harvesting wireless communications, addressing reliability and efficiency challenges by unifying various design problems under a general model.

Contribution

It presents a novel, versatile optimization framework that encompasses multiple problem types in EH wireless systems, aiding practical system design under diverse conditions.

Findings

Framework effectively maximizes utility in EH systems

Guidelines for system design with different channel and energy assumptions

Applicable to both single-user and multiuser scenarios

Abstract

In recent years, wireless communication systems are expected to achieve more cost-efficient and sustainable operations by replacing conventional fixed power supplies such as batteries with energy harvesting (EH) devices, which could provide electric energy from renewable energy sources (e.g., solar and wind). Such EH power supplies, however, are random and instable in nature, and as a result impose new challenges on reliable communication design and have triggered substantial research interests in EH based wireless communications. Building upon existing works, in this article, we develop a general optimization framework to maximize the utility of EH wireless communication systems. Our framework encapsulates a variety of design problems, such as throughput maximization and outage probability minimization in single-user and multiuser setups, and provides useful guidelines to the practical design of general EH based communication systems with different assumptions over the knowledge of time-varying wireless channels and EH rates at the transmitters.