Asymptotically Optimal Power Allocation for Energy Harvesting Communication Networks

For a general energy harvesting (EH) communication network, i.e., a network where the nodes generate their transmit power through EH, we derive the asymptotically optimal online power allocation solution that optimizes a general utility function when the number of transmit time slots, N, and the battery capacities of the EH nodes, B-max, satisfy N -> infinity and B-max -> infinity. The considered family of utility functions is general enough to include the most important performance measures in communication theory, such as the average data rate, outage probability, average bit-error probability, and average signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed power allocation solution is very simple. Namely, the asymptotically optimal power allocation for the EH network is identical to the optimal power allocation for an equivalent non-EH network whose nodes have infinite energy available but their average transmit power is constrained to be equal to the average harvested power and/or the maximum average transmit power of the corresponding nodes in the EH network. Moreover, the maximum average performance of a general EH network converges to the maximum average performance of the corresponding equivalent non-EH network, when N -> infinity and B-max -> infinity Although the proposed solution is asymptotic in nature, it is applicable to EH systems transmitting in a large but finite number of time slots and having a battery capacity much larger than the average harvested power and/or the maximum average transmit power.