Energy-Aware Scheduling for Broadcast Erasure Channels With Two Energy Harvesting Receivers

Abstract

A feedback-based coding algorithm is studied for broadcast packet erasure channels (BPECs) with energy harvesting receivers. A probabilistic algorithm is outlined, which is able to achieve the capacity region of two-user BPECs. The probabilistic algorithm is carefully studied from the optimization perspective. In this paper, we take into account the energy levels of receivers. Two new feedback schemes are proposed to reduce the energy consumption of receivers and we explain the advantage of each feedback scheme. We formulate the problem of maximizing the minimum weighted throughput of receivers for each feedback scheme. After several convexifications, we make the formulated optimizations tractable and propose an algorithm to solve the problems globally without compromising optimality. Once optimization problems are solved, we propose an energy-aware scheduling for packet broadcasting. Finally, a packet header design is proposed to enable utilization of the energy-aware scheduling. Simulation results verify that to achieve the optimal throughput, network-coding is necessary.