Age-Minimal Online Policies for Energy Harvesting Sensors with Incremental Battery Recharges
Ahmed Arafa, Jing Yang, Sennur Ulukus, H. Vincent Poor

TL;DR
This paper studies optimal online update policies for energy-harvesting sensors with incremental battery recharges, aiming to minimize the long-term average age of information under energy causality constraints.
Contribution
It characterizes the structure of optimal renewal policies and explicitly derives the optimal policy for the case of two energy units, revealing an energy-dependent threshold policy.
Findings
Optimal policies follow a renewal structure with independent inter-update times.
For B=2, the optimal policy has an energy-dependent threshold form.
The policy minimizes the long-term average age of information.
Abstract
A sensor node that is sending measurement updates regarding some physical phenomenon to a destination is considered. The sensor relies on energy harvested from nature to transmit its updates, and is equipped with a finite -sized battery to save its harvested energy. Energy recharges the battery incrementally in units, according to a Poisson process, and one update consumes one energy unit to reach the destination. The setting is online, where the energy arrival times are revealed causally after the energy is harvested. The goal is to update the destination in a timely manner, namely, such that the long term average age of information is minimized, subject to energy causality constraints. The age of information at a given time is defined as the time spent since the latest update has reached the destination. It is shown that the optimal update policy follows a renewal structure, where…
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