Competitive design of energy harvesting communications in wireless fading channels

This paper considers the design of online transmission policies for slotted energy harvesting point-to-point communications systems in wireless fading channels. The objective is to minimize the competitive rate gap that is defined as the maximum gap between the optimal rates that can be achieved by the offline, and online transmission policies over all possible energy arrival profiles, and fading states. The paper introduces the competitive rate gap analysis, and solves the particular case of two transmission slots. For two time slots, we show that the optimal competitive rate gap is 0.2075 bits/s/Hz, and present a transmission policy that achieves it. The new online policy is shown to outperform previously proposed online policies, such as the myopic policy.