An Alternative Perspective on Utility Maximization in Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

We present an analysis of optimization problems in energy-harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs), and motivated by the underlying structure of these problems, we provide an intuitive algorithmic solution. Although, on one hand, there exist excellent analytic solutions for EH problems cast in a utility maximization framework and, on the other hand, there are many efficient numerical iterative solutions for solving complex or unstructured constrained utility maximization problems, neither of these approaches provides analytical intuition concerning the behavior of a more general (complex many varied constraints) constrained utility maximization problem. We deliver our general solution to the concave utility maximization problem for EH-WSNs and illustrate the well-known solutions of special equivalent problems. Both distributed estimation and rate allocation find solutions in our constrained utility maximization method for EH-WSNs. We extract some of the analytical insights to be gained from these problems and simulate several example scenarios.