Optimal Transmission Policy for Renewable Sensor Networks

We consider optimized transmission policies for sensors with renewable energy sources. Depending on the reward for successfully transmitting a message and the energy status of a sensor itself, we will prove the existence of optimal thresholds that maximize the average reward rate. Our results are quite general since the reward values can be made application-specific. Compared with the unconditional "transmit-all" policy, which transmits every message as long as the battery energy is nonzero, we will show that the proposed optimal transmission policy can achieve significant gains in the average reward rate.