Energy harvesting receivers: Optimal sampling and decoding policies

When receivers rely on stochastic energy harvesting, the processes of sampling and decoding may be interrupted by power outages. This will affect the reliable communication rate. To model the receiver, we decompose the processing tasks in two parts: first is sampling or Analog-to-Digital Conversion (ADC) which includes all RF front-end processing, and second is decoding. In this work, we consider a source that transmits codewords from a fixed rate codebook through a memoryless channel. Based on the relative energy costs of sampling and decoding, we determine the policy that maximizes the receiver´s message decoding rate when there is excess energy in the average harvesting rate but the receiver´s battery capacity constrains the packet decoding rate.