A Low-Complexity Policy for Outage Probability Minimization With an Energy Harvesting Transmitter

Outage probability in an energy harvesting (EH) block-fading communication system is studied in the finite-horizon online setting. First, the offline version of the problem is considered, and formulated as a mixed integer linear program (MILP). Then, the infinite-horizon online problem (IIL) is considered relaxing the battery constraints. Solutions of these two problems provide lower bounds on the finite-horizon online problem, for which we provide a low-complexity heuristic scheme, called the fixed threshold transmission (FTT) scheme. Numerical results show that the FTT scheme achieves an outage performance close to the MILP lower bound for a wide range of operation regimes, and close to IIL when the EH rate is low. It is also observed that the power allocated by the FTT scheme resembles the optimal offline solution with high probability, despite the lack of information about future channel states and energy arrivals.