Supporting quality of service in energy harvesting wireless links: The effective capacity analysis

This paper studies the quality of service (QoS) performance of wireless links powered by energy harvesting techniques with finite energy battery. We adopt a discretized energy arrival and power allocation model and a finite state Markov chain (FSMC) channel model, and hence, the service process can be modeled as a FSMC. The effective capacity for given power allocation policies is analyzed to characterize the QoS performance of energy harvesting wireless links. Based on the analysis, we evaluate the effective capacity of some commonly used power allocation policies compared with non-energy harvesting system via numerical simulations. It is shown that the performance degrades due to the randomness of energy arrival, and the constant-greedy policy achieves the highest effective capacity among all the considered policies in the high SNR regime.