We consider an energy-harvesting communication system where a transmitter powered by an exogenous energy arrival process and equipped with a finite battery of size B max communicates over a discrete-time AWGN channel. We first concentrate on a simple Bernoulli energy arrival process where at each time step, either an energy packet of size E is harvested with probability p, or no energy is harvested at all, independent of the other time steps. We provide a near optimal energy control policy and a simple approximation to the information-theoretic capacity of this channel. Our approximations for both problems are universal in all the system parameters involved (p, E and B max ), i.e., we bound the approximation gaps by a constant independent of the parameter values. Our results suggest that a battery size B max ≥ E is (approximately) sufficient to extract the infinite battery capacity of this channel. We then extend our results to general i.i.d. energy arrival processes. Our approximate capacity characterizations provide important insights for the optimal design of energy harvesting communication systems in the regime where both the battery size and the average energy arrival rate are large. Index Terms-Energy harvesting channel, information-theoretic capacity, online power control, constant gap approximation, receiver side information.
The information-theoretic capacity of the energy harvesting channel in Fig. 1 has been of significant recent interest [2]- REF .
Near Optimal Energy Control and Approximate Capacity of Energy Harvesting Communication
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Mathematics Computer Science