Performance Analysis for Energy Harvesting Communication Systems: From Throughput to Energy Diversity

TL;DR

This paper analyzes energy harvesting wireless communication systems, comparing throughput and outage performance with traditional power sources, and introduces the concept of energy diversity to quantify outage probability improvements.

Contribution

It provides the first analytical comparison of throughput between EH and conventional systems and introduces energy diversity as a new metric for outage performance.

Findings

EH systems can achieve comparable long-term throughput to traditional systems.

Energy diversity gain varies with power supply models.

Asymptotic outage probability decreases with high energy arrival rates.

Abstract

Energy harvesting (EH) based communication has raised great research interests due to its wide application and the feasibility of commercialization. In this paper, we consider wireless communications with EH constraints at the transmitter. First, for delay-tolerant traffic, we investigate the long-term average throughput maximization problem and analytically compare the throughput performance against that of a system supported by conventional power supplies. Second, for delay-sensitive traffic, we analyze the outage probability by studying its asymptotic behavior in the high energy arrival rate regime, where the new concept of energy diversity is formally introduced. Moreover, we show that the speed of outage probability approaching zero, termed energy diversity gain, varies under different power supply models.