Design of Communication Systems with Energy Harvesting Transmitters and Receivers

An energy harvesting node (EHN) operates using the energy harvested from the environment, e.g., solar, piezoelectric and radio frequency, which presents the tantalizing possibility of perpetually operating of sensor nodes. However, the operation of an EHN is governed by the energy neutrality constraint (ENC), which makes it mandatory that, at any point in time, the total cumulative energy consumed by a node must not exceed the total cumulative energy harvested by it. Due to the random and sporadic nature of the harvested energy, energy management becomes the central issue in the optimization of energy harvesting (EH) communication systems. The design of energy management policies for the systems where only the transmitter is an EHN has been considered extensively in the literature. On the other hand, designing the policies for the networks where both the transmitter and receiver use harvested energy to operate is significantly more challenging, as aspects of coordination of the transmission attempts as well as nonzero decoding cost come into play. In this thesis, we present the design of energy management policies for a variety of scenarios where all nodes in a network are energy harvesting. The main contributions of this thesis are as follows: • In the initial part of the thesis (Chapters 2-5), we present the design of packet drop probability (PDP)-optimal power control policies for retransmission-based multihop EH links where all the nodes are EHNs and the cost of decoding the data at the receiver is nonzero. In order to design the policies, we first derive closed-form PDP expressions for multi-hop EH links employing retransmission index based policies (RIPs) that are unaware of the state-of-charge (SoC) of the batteries at the nodes. Since the transmit power prescribed by an SoC-unaware RIP is independent of the current battery state, the RIPs obviate the need to measure the SoC of the battery. In practice, it is difficult to accurately measure the SoC of the battery,