Tandem Networks with Intermittent Energy

Energy harvesting may be needed to operate digital devices in locations where connecting them to the power grid and changing batteries is difficult. However, energy harvesting is often intermittent resulting in a random flow of energy into the device. It is then necessary to analyse systems where both the workload, and the energy supply, must be represented by random processes. Thus, in this paper, we consider a multi-hop tandem network where each hop receives energy locally in a random process, and packets arrive at each of the nodes and then flow through the multi-hop connection to the sink. We present a product-form solution for this N-hop tandem network when both energy is represented by discrete entities, and data is in the form of discrete packets.