A harvest-use-store mode for energy harvesting communication systems with optimal power policy

Energy harvesting (EH) technology has become a promising alternative to solve the problem of the energy-limited wireless systems. As such, in this paper, we consider optimization of a single-user wireless communication system, where an EH transmitter operates in harvest-use-store (HUS) mode with the non-ideal rechargeable battery. With the storage efficiency and causality constraints, our key design goal is to maximize the throughput over a finite horizon transmission blocks under a non-fading channel scenario. Assuming the energy harvesting profile is known prior to transmission, we explore the properties of the optimal power allocation solution by the Lagrangian optimization algorithm (e.g., KKT). Further, based on this, we propose an optimal offline policy with the dynamic programming (DP) approach. Numerical results show that our proposed optimal transmission policy is indeed able to improve the overall throughput as compared to existing schemes.