Energy Allocation for Sensing and Transmission in WSNs with Energy Harvesting Tx/Rx

This paper studies the energy allocation for sensing and data transmitting in communication systems with energy harvesting sensor nodes. The investigated system consists of a point-to-point data transmission between two energy harvesting nodes that have limited batteries capacity and communicating over a wireless fading channel. The transmitter aims to optimize the throughput over slotted system and in an infinite horizon subject to time-varying conditions. These conditions include the energy harvested at both nodes, available energy at both nodes and the channel state. The energy allocation problem is formulated as a sequential decision problem. An optimal algorithm is given and a low-complexity suboptimal energy allocation algorithm is also proposed. Simulation results show the gain when the transmitter takes into account the state of energy at the receiver and that the proposed heuristic algorithm achieves near-optimal number of transmitted bits with lower complexity.