Distributed Scheduling Schemes in Energy Harvesting Multiple Access

We consider a time-slotted distributed multiple access channel model with energy harvesting transmitters, where each transmitter is equipped with a battery of finite capacity. At the start of each time slot, a random amount of harvested energy is available from an exogenous energy source. Each transmitter only knows its own arrival process, and is unaware of the energy arrival processes at the other terminals, leading to a distributed access system. For this set up, we design efficient rate and power scheduling policies to maximize the average throughput (sum-rate) under slot-wise coding and decoding requirements. We show that the proposed policies achieve the same gap to optimality as the recently proposed ergodic averaging schemes which require coding and decoding over a large number of slots in our setting.