Energy-efficient resource allocation techniques for battery management with energy harvesting nodes: A theoretical approach

This paper addresses the problem of radio resource allocation in a multi-user broadcast downlink flat-fading channel, where the receiving nodes are considered to be battery-powered devices provided with energy harvesting sources. Models for the energy consumption of the RF and decoding stages are discussed and included explicitly in the design of the resource allocation strategy. The allocation is considered as a theoretical approach, using the information theoretic rate given by Shannon's formula. Bandwidth, power, and data rate are optimized considering energy-related constraints related to the status of the batteries in order to increase the lifetime of the users and, thus, the global 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 data rate achieved by the network nodes is increased.