Energy Harvesting Systems With Continuous Energy and Data Arrivals: The Optimal Offline and Heuristic Online Algorithms

Energy harvesting has been developed as an effective technology for communication systems in order to extend their lifetime. In this paper, we consider a single-user energy harvesting wireless communication system, in which arrival data and harvested energy curves are modeled as continuous functions. Our first goal is to find an offline algorithm, which maximizes the amount of data, which is transmitted to the receiver node by a given deadline. If more than one scheme exists that transmits the maximum data, we choose the one with minimum utilized energy at the transmitter node. We find this optimal algorithm, by showing its properties. Next, we propose an online algorithm for this system and obtain its performance bound.