On Optimal Power Control for Energy Harvesting Communications with Lookahead

TL;DR

This paper analyzes optimal power control strategies for energy harvesting communication systems with lookahead capabilities, providing analytical characterizations and bounds for maximum throughput under certain energy arrival models.

Contribution

It offers an implicit Bellman equation-based characterization and explicit bounds for Bernoulli energy arrivals, advancing understanding of power control with lookahead in energy harvesting systems.

Findings

Implicit Bellman equation characterization of optimal policies.

Explicit bounds for Bernoulli energy arrivals.

Bounds are efficiently computable via convex optimization.

Abstract

Consider the problem of power control for an energy harvesting communication system, where the transmitter is equipped with a finite-sized rechargeable battery and is able to look ahead to observe a fixed number of future energy arrivals. An implicit characterization of the maximum average throughput over an additive white Gaussian noise channel and the associated optimal power control policy is provided via the Bellman equation under the assumption that the energy arrival process is stationary and memoryless. A more explicit characterization is obtained for the case of Bernoulli energy arrivals by means of asymptotically tight upper and lower bounds on both the maximum average throughput and the optimal power control policy. Apart from their pivotal role in deriving the desired analytical results, such bounds are highly valuable from a numerical perspective as they can be efficiently computed using convex optimization solvers.