Asymptotically optimal power allocation for point-to-point energy harvesting communication systems

Abstract

For a point-to-point communication system generating its power via energy harvesting (EH), we derive the asymptotically optimal power allocation which optimizes a general utility function when the number of transmitted codewords N and the battery capacity B <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</sub> satisfy N → ∞ and B <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</sub> → ∞. The considered family of utility functions is general enough to include the most important performance measurements in communication theory such as ergodic rate, outage probability, average signal-to-noise ratio, etc. The discovered solution is very simple. Namely, the optimal power allocation for the EH system is identical to the optimal power allocation of an equivalent non-EH communication system with infinite available energy, under the constraint that both systems use identical average transmit powers. Although the proposed solution is asymptotic, it is applicable to EH systems transmitting a large but finite number of codewords and having a battery capacity much larger than the average harvested power and/or the maximum average transmit power.