Power allocation and transmitter switching for broadcasting with multiple energy harvesting transmitters

With the advancement of battery technology, energy harvesting communication systems attracted great research attention in recent years. However, energy harvesting communication systems with multiple transmitters and multiple receivers have not been considered yet. In this paper, the problem of broadcasting in a communication system with multiple energy harvesting transmitters and multiple receivers is studied. First, regarding the transmitters as a ‘whole transmitter,’ the optimal total transmission power is obtained and an optimal power allocation policy is extended to our system setup, with the aim of minimizing the transmission completion time. Then, a simpler power allocation policy is developed to allocate the optimal total transmission power to the data transmissions. As transmitter switching can provide flexibility and robustness to an energy harvesting communication system, especially when a transmitter is broken or the energy harvested by a transmitter is insufficient, a transmitter switching policy is further developed to choose a suitable transmitter to work whenever necessary. The results show that the proposed power allocation policy performs close to the optimal one and outperforms some heuristic ones in terms of transmission completion time. Besides, the proposed transmitter switching policy outperforms some heuristic ones in terms of number of switches.