Energy harvesting receivers: Finite battery capacity

When receivers rely on energy harvesting, energy outages will constrain reliable communication. To model the harvesting receiver, we decompose the processing tasks in two parts: first is sampling or Analog-to-Digital-Conversion (ADC) stage which includes all RF front-end processing, and second is decoding. We propose a model in which, for a given code rate, channel capacity, and battery size, the receiver can choose the sampling rate to balance the sampling and decoding energy costs. We then characterize the maximum reliable communication rate over the choice of sampling rate and code rate and we verify that the sampling rate should be maximized. In addition, we consider the fixed-timing transmission system and show that under some conditions the same rates can also be achieved.