Delay optimal scheduling for energy harvesting based communications

We consider the efficient scheduling problem for a bursty wireless link that is powered by a capacity-limited battery storing the harvested energy with the power grid as a backup. Specifically, we propose a scheduling scheme, which allows the source node to rely on the harvested energy supply to transmit packets whenever possible, and draw the grid power when necessary, but with an average power constraint. We formulate a two-dimensional Markov chain, and give an analysis on the average queuing delay and the average power consumption from the grid. Then, a linear programming problem is formulated to minimize the average delay under the constraint of a maximum allowable power consumption from the grid. By analyzing the corresponding optimization problem, we obtain the optimal scheduling policy and the optimal transmission parameters.