Low-Latency and Energy-Efficient Wireless Communications with Energy Harvesting

Energy harvesting (EH) aided communications hold a great potential in the design of green communication systems for their high energy efficiency. However, the random power supply due to EH may cause an intolerable delay in data transmission. To overcome this, a Reliable Energy Source (RES) is desired to provide transmission power when the large delay is induced. In this paper, we study the delay-optimal scheduling policy for EH aided communications with the constraint of average power provided by RES. More specifically, the delay-minimal scheduling is obtained through the two-dimensional Markov chain modeling and linear programming (LP) formulation. To further reduce the computational complexity, we present a value iteration algorithm, based on which we not only reveal a threshold-based structure of the delay-optimal scheduling policy for EH-aided communications with large-capacity batteries, but also conceive a low complexity policy that is asymptotically optimal. For EH-aided communications with finite-capacity batteries, we present a unified framework based on large deviation theory. The non-asymptotic framework demonstrates that the delay-power tradeoff curve of the low complexity scheduling policy is capable of converging to that of the delay-optimal policy exponentially as the capacity of the battery increases.