Energy-harvesting powered transmissions of bursty data packets with strict deadlines

Energy harvesting has been widely considered in many wireless applications, especially the wireless sensor networks. This paper develops a novel approach to energy-harvesting powered transmissions under arbitrary packet arrival process and strict deadline constraints over time-varying channels. It is shown that the problem can be formulated as a convex program. Relying on the specific structure of the optimality conditions, we put forth an efficient algorithm with a low computational complexity to find the optimal rate control strategy. An insightful visualization is also provided to depict the construction of the optimal policy. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the merit of the proposed scheme.