Can Feedback Increase the Capacity of the Energy Harvesting Channel?

TL;DR

This paper explores whether feedback can enhance the capacity of energy harvesting channels, demonstrating that feedback can indeed increase capacity in specific scenarios with deterministic and i.i.d. energy arrivals.

Contribution

It provides explicit capacity calculations for special cases and shows feedback's capacity-increasing effect in energy harvesting channels.

Findings

Feedback increases capacity in deterministic energy arrival scenarios.

Explicit capacity formulas are derived for a simple BEC case.

Feedback can improve capacity even with stochastic energy arrivals.

Abstract

We investigate if feedback can increase the capacity of an energy harvesting communication channel where a transmitter powered by an exogenous energy arrival process and equipped with a finite battery communicates to a receiver over a memoryless channel. For a simple special case where the energy arrival process is deterministic and the channel is a BEC, we explicitly compute the feed-forward and feedback capacities and show that feedback can strictly increase the capacity of this channel. Building on this example, we also show that feedback can increase the capacity when the energy arrivals are i.i.d. known noncausally at the transmitter and the receiver.