Energy and Data Cooperative Multiple Access Channel With Intermittent Data Arrivals

Abstract

We consider an energy harvesting two user cooperative Gaussian multiple access channel, where both of the users harvest energy from nature. The users cooperate at the physical layer (data cooperation) by establishing common messages through overheard signals and then cooperatively sending them. We study two scenarios within this model. In the first scenario, the data packets arrive intermittently over time. We find the optimal offline transmit power and rate allocation policy that maximize the departure region. We first show that there exists an optimal policy, in which the single user rate constraints in each time slot are tight, yielding a one-to-one relation between the powers and rates. Then, we formulate the departure region maximization problem as a weighted sum departure maximization in terms of rates only. Next, we propose a sequential convex approximation method to approximate the problem at each step and show that it converges to the optimal solution. We solve the approximate problems using an inner–outer decomposition method. In the second scenario, the data packets are available at the beginning of the transmission, but the users now have the ability to cooperate at the battery level (energy cooperation), in addition to data cooperation. The energy cooperation is facilitated by wireless energy transfer and is bidirectional. For this scenario, we find the jointly optimal offline transmit power and rate allocation policy together with the energy transfer policy that maximize the departure region. We provide necessary conditions for energy transfer and prove some properties of the optimal transmit policy, thereby shedding some light on the interplay between energy and data cooperation.