Efficient Data Transmission for an Energy Harvesting Node with Battery Capacity Constraint

Energy harvesting is increasingly gaining importance as a means to charge battery powered devices such as sensor nodes. Efficient transmission strategies must be developed taking into account both the availability of energy and data in the node. In this paper, the best data transmission strategy is found by taking into account that the node has a finite battery capacity and that the data and energy arrivals occur at known time instants. Losing energy due to overflows of the battery is proved to be inefficient unless there is no more data to transmit. Finally, an algorithm that computes the data transmission curve minimizing the total transmission time while spending the minimum energy and that satisfies energy and data constraints has been developed.