Age-Minimal Transmission for Energy Harvesting Sensors with Finite Batteries: Online Policies
Ahmed Arafa, Jing Yang, Sennur Ulukus, H. Vincent Poor

TL;DR
This paper derives optimal online transmission policies for energy-harvesting sensors with finite batteries to minimize the long-term average age of information, considering different energy arrival models and threshold-based strategies.
Contribution
It characterizes the optimal renewal policies with explicit energy-dependent thresholds for minimizing AoI in energy-harvesting sensors with finite batteries.
Findings
Optimal renewal policies are identified for both energy models.
Explicit closed-form thresholds depend on available energy.
Thresholds decrease as battery energy increases, with the minimum threshold equal to the optimal AoI.
Abstract
An energy-harvesting sensor node that is sending status updates to a destination is considered. The sensor is equipped with a battery of finite size to save its incoming energy, and consumes one unit of energy per status update transmission, which is delivered to the destination instantly over an error-free channel. The setting is online in which the harvested energy is revealed to the sensor causally over time, and the goal is to design status update transmission policy such that the long term average age of information (AoI) is minimized. AoI is defined as the time elapsed since the latest update has reached at the destination. Two energy arrival models are considered: a random battery recharge (RBR) model, and an incremental battery recharge (IBR) model. In both models, energy arrives according to a Poisson process with unit rate, with values that completely fill up the battery in…
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