Joint Battery-Buffer Sustainable Guarantees in Energy-Harvesting Enabled Wireless Networks

In light of the drastically-increasing demands on ubiquitous information acquisition and exchange, battery-powered devices are playing a more critical role in wireless networking, which inspires and expedites the development of energy-harvesting techniques. The sustainability requirements for such devices include two mutual-impacting dimensions: energy supply avoiding battery outage and stable transmissions avoiding buffer overflow. We in this paper propose a power-and-rate adaption scheme subject to the constraints on buffer-overflow probability and battery-outage probability in energy-harvesting enabled networks. The two probability constraints address the statistical assurance for the two-dimensional sustainability, which is suitable to dealing with the highly unpredictable energy-harvesting and channel fading statuses. Specifically, by applying the asymptotic queuing analyses to data-transmission and energy-harvesting processes, we can characterize both of the battery-outage and buffer-overflow probabilities via the effective-capacity/-bandwidth theories. Then, we formulate the effective-capacity optimization problem, which maximizes the sustainable throughput while complying with the statistical buffer-overflow and battery-outage constraints, and solve for the optimal power-adaptation scheme. We also conducted abundant simulations to evaluate our scheme´s performances, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme over existing baseline schemes, as well as study the impact of sustainability requirements on the performances.