Communication of Energy Harvesting Tags

We solve the problem of designing an affordable optimal transmission strategy for the recently proposed system of energy-harvesting active networked tags (EnHANTs), that is adapted to the identification request and the energy harvesting dynamic. We assume that the system operates in a time-slotted fashion, so that the problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). Both a static exhaustive search method and a modified policy iteration algorithm are employed to obtain the optimal transmission policy. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the obtained transmission policy can considerably improve the overall system performance which takes into consideration of both the system activity-time and the communication reliability.