An energy harvesting (EH) transmitter communicating over a time-correlated wireless channel is considered. The transmitter is capable of sensing the current channel state, albeit at the cost of both energy and transmission time. The EH transmitter aims to maximize its long-term throughput by choosing one of the following actions: 1) defer its transmission to save energy for future use; 2) transmit reliably at a low rate; 3) transmit at a high rate; and 4) sense the channel to reveal the channel state at a cost of energy and transmission time, and then decide to defer or to transmit. The problem is formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process with a belief on the channel state. The optimal policy is shown to exhibit a threshold behavior on the belief state, with battery-dependent threshold values. The optimal threshold values and performance are characterized numerically via the value iteration algorithm as well as a policy search algorithm that exploits the threshold structure of the optimal policy. Our results demonstrate that, despite the associated time and energy cost, sensing the channel intelligently to track the channel state improves the achievable long-term throughput significantly as compared to the performance of those protocols lacking this ability as well as the one that always senses the channel.
Gilbert-Elliott channel model has been previously investigated in the context of scheduling an EH transmitter in @cite_25 , where the transmitter always has perfect CSI, obtained by sensing at every time slot. The transmitter makes a decision to defer or to transmit based on the current CSI and the battery state. Similarly, without considering the channel sensing capability, @cite_11 addresses the problem of optimal power management for an EH sensor over a multi-state wireless channel with memory. Unlike previous work, we take into account the energy cost of channel sensing which can be significant for a low-power EH transmitter. Therefore, in order to minimize the energy consumed for channel sensing, an EH transmitter does not necessarily sense the channel at every time slot, and instead, it keeps an updated belief of the channel state according to its past observations, and only occasionally senses the current channel state.
@cite_25 @cite_11
2094169594 2005435577
In this paper, we consider a source node that operates over a time varying channel with energy harvesting capability. The goal of the source is to maximize the average number of successfully delivered packets per time slot. The source is able to choose whether to transmit a packet or defer the transmission in each time slot. The decision which is chosen by the source depends on the channel information available and the length of the energy queue. We formulate the problem of finding the optimal policy as a Markovian decision problem. We show some properties of the value function that represents the discounted number of successfully delivered packets per time slot. We prove that the optimal policy is a threshold type policy depending on the state of the channel and the length of the energy queue. We also derive an upper bound for the average number of packets per time slots successfully received by the destination. We show using numerical results that this bound is a tight bound on the performance of the optimal policy. And we consider the case of time varying channel but without channel state information (CSI). Then, we study the impact of channel time varying nature and the availability of CSI. In this case, we show that the optimal policy is a greedy policy. The performance of this greedy policy is also calculated. This paper addresses the problem of finding outage- optimal power control policies for wireless energy harvesting sensor (EHS) nodes with automatic repeat request (ARQ)-based packet transmissions. The power control policy of the EHS specifies the transmission power for each packet transmission attempt, based on all the information available at the EHS. In particular, the acknowledgement (ACK) or negative acknowledgement (NACK) messages received provide the EHS with partial information about the channel state. We solve the problem of finding an optimal power control policy by casting it as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We study the structure of the optimal power policy in two ways. First, for the special case of binary power levels at the EHS, we show that the optimal policy for the underlying Markov decision process (MDP) when the channel state is observable is a threshold policy in the battery state. Second, we benchmark the performance of the EHS by rigorously analyzing the outage probability of a general fixed-power transmission scheme, where the EHS uses a predetermined power level at each slot within the frame. Monte Carlo simulation results illustrate the performance of the POMDP approach and verify the accuracy of the analysis. They also show that the POMDP solutions can significantly outperform conventional ad hoc approaches.