Joint Optimization for Power Scheduling and Transfer in Energy Harvesting Communications

This paper considers an energy harvesting communication system consisting of a communication link powered by the energy harvested from the natural environment and the energy wirelessly transferred from a remote dedicated energy source. We study three optimization approaches for this system: transmit power scheduling which allows the transmitter to sequentially optimize its transmit power, energy requesting which lets the transmitter to sequentially decide the amount of energy to be requested from the dedicated energy source, and a joint optimization approach for the transmitter to jointly decide the transmit power scheduling and energy requesting. We derive the optimal policy for each of the above approaches that can maximize the long-term average payoff of the communication link. We present numerical results to compare the performances of different optimizations under different settings and conditions.