Energy harvesting for cooperative wireless sensor networks with a nonlinear power consumption model

We consider an energy harvesting for cooperative wireless sensor networks with a nonlinear power consumption model. The information transmission from the source to the destination is assumed to occur via several clusters of decode- and-forward relays. All the source and relay nodes are assumed to have the ability to harvest energy from the environment and use the harvested energy to transmit the information to the next hop. We establish an optimization problem that maximizes the total throughput of the end-to-end link over a number of transmission blocks, subject to constraints of energy causality, battery overflow and the duration of energy harvesting. The optimization problem is found to be a non-concave program and we present a simple algorithm to solve the non-concave program. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed optimization.