Capacity and fairness of the multiple access channel in energy harvesting wireless networks

Abstract

In this paper, we obtain the capacity region for the AWGN Multiple Access Channel (MAC) with transmitters equipped with energy harvesters. We then develop low delay, adaptive transmission strategies that surprisingly achieve near optimal performance under finite battery resource constrained settings for the flat fading MAC. We describe the rate-fairness tradeoff inherent to the MAC and adapt the well known proportionally fair (PF) rate allocation to energy harvesting nodes. We develop new adaptive transmission strategies based on the PF rate allocation that achieves points above the rate-fairness boundary of the convex hull of the PF rate allocation.