Energy harvesting multi-hop networks allow for perpetual operation of low cost, limited range wireless devices. Compared with their battery operated counterparts, the coupling of energy and data causality constraints with half duplex relay operation
makes it challenging to operate such networks. In this paper, a throughput maximization problem for energy harvesting two-hop networks with decode-and-forward half-duplex relays is investigated. For a system with two parallel relays, various combinations of the following four transmission modes are considered: Broadcast from the source, multi-access from the relays, and successive relaying phases I and II. Optimal transmission policies for one and two parallel relays are studied under the assumption of non-causal knowledge of energy arrivals and finite size relay data buffers. The problem is formulated using a convex optimization framework, which allows for efficient numerical solutions and helps identify important properties of optimal policies. Numerical results are presented to provide throughput comparisons and to investigate the impact of multiple relays, size of relay data buffers, transmission modes, and energy harvesting on the throughput.
The wide bandwidth and large number of antennas used in millimeter wave systems put a heavy burden on the power consumption at the receiver. In this paper, using an additive quantization noise model, the effect of analog-digital conversion (ADC) reso
lution and bandwidth on the achievable rate is investigated for a multi-antenna system under a receiver power constraint. Two receiver architectures, analog and digital combining, are compared in terms of performance. Results demonstrate that: (i) For both analog and digital combining, there is a maximum bandwidth beyond which the achievable rate decreases; (ii) Depending on the operating regime of the system, analog combiner may have higher rate but digital combining uses less bandwidth when only ADC power consumption is considered, (iii) digital combining may have higher rate when power consumption of all the components in the receiver front-end are taken into account.
Source-channel coding for an energy limited wireless sensor node is investigated. The sensor node observes independent Gaussian source samples with variances changing over time slots and transmits to a destination over a flat fading channel. The fadi
ng is constant during each time slot. The compressed samples are stored in a finite size data buffer and need to be delivered in at most $d$ time slots. The objective is to design optimal transmission policies, namely, optimal power and distortion allocation, over the time slots such that the average distortion at destination is minimized. In particular, optimal transmission policies with various energy constraints are studied. First, a battery operated system in which sensor node has a finite amount of energy at the beginning of transmission is investigated. Then, the impact of energy harvesting, energy cost of processing and sampling are considered. For each energy constraint, a convex optimization problem is formulated, and the properties of optimal transmission policies are identified. For the strict delay case, $d=1$, $2D$ waterfilling interpretation is provided. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the structure of the optimal transmission policy, to analyze the effect of delay constraints, data buffer size, energy harvesting, processing and sampling costs.
