Optimal harvest-use-store design for delay-constrained energy harvesting wireless communications

Recent advances in energy harvesting (EH) technology have motivated the adoption of rechargeable mobile devices for communications. In this paper, we consider a point-to-point (P2P) wireless communication system in which an EH transmitter with a non-ideal rechargeable battery is required to send a given fixed number of bits to the receiver before they expire according to a preset delay constraint. Due to the possible energy loss in the storage process, the harvest-use-and-store (HUS) architecture is adopted. We characterize the properties of the optimal solutions, for additive white Gaussian channels (AWGNs) and then block-fading channels, that maximize the energy efficiency (i.e., battery residual) subject to a given rate requirement. Interestingly, it is shown that the optimal solution has a water-filling interpretation with double thresholds and that both thresholds are mono-tonic. Based on this, we investigate the optimal double-threshold based allocation policy and devise an algorithm to achieve the solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the theoretical analysis and to compare the optimal solutions with existing schemes.