Sustainability-Driven Power Control for Energy Harvesting Enhanced Wireless Transmission

Battery-powered wireless nodes´ lifetime can be significantly extended by integrating energy-harvesting function. As energy-harvesting is a highly varying process, the guarantee of batteries´ sustainability becomes extremely crucial for nodes that record and deliver multimedia content. We in this paper propose a sustainability-driven power control scheme for wireless transmission with energy-harvesting function. In particular, we first present a statistical sustainability guarantee framework, where the probability of battery-low status needs to be lower than a specified threshold. Then, by developing a novel inversely-queuing technique, we can readily apply the effective bandwidth/capacity theory to explicitly identify the battery-low probability as a function of the energy harvesting and consuming processes. Following these results, we formulate the throughput maximization problem subject to the statistical sustainability constraint. We then solve for the optimal sustainability-driven power control scheme and discuss its associated characteristics. A set of simulation results are also presented to show the superiority of our proposed scheme as compared to the baseline schemes such as the constant-power variable-rate scheme and constant-rate variable-power scheme.