Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation Techniques for Battery Management with Energy Harvesting Nodes: a Practical Approach

This paper addresses the problem of resource allocation in a broadcast scenario with frequency selective channels where the terminals are considered to be batterypowered devices provided with energy harvesting capabilities. Models for the energy consumption of the RF and decoding stages are discussed and included in the design of the proposed resource allocation policies. The allocation is performed discretely over subcarrier, bit loading, and power by means of practical greedy-like algorithms and considering energy-related constraints in order to increase the duration of the batteries and, thus, the network lifetime. Simulation results show that not only the usage of battery is improved when compared with other traditional allocation policies, but also the average bit-rate is enhanced.