Information Capacity of an Energy Harvesting Sensor Node

Abstract: Energy harvesting sensor nodes are gaining popularity due to their ability to improve the network life time and are becoming a preferred choice supporting 'green communication'. In this paper we focus on communicating reliably over an AWGN channel using such an energy harvesting sensor node. An important part of this work involves appropriate modeling of the energy harvesting, as done via various practical architectures. Our main result is the characterization of the Shannon capacity of the communication system. The key technical challenge involves dealing with the dynamic (and stochastic) nature of the (quadratic) cost of the input to the channel. As a corollary, we find close connections between the capacity achieving energy management policies and the queueing theoretic throughput optimal policies.