Evaluation of Operation Policies for Energy Harvesting Sensor Nodes with Variable Data Traffic

Abstract:
We discuss a mathematical characterization of communication devices with energy harvesting capabilities. We consider a terminal powered both by an external source with timevarying energy supply, and a battery with finite storage, and we focus on their interaction. To this end, we make use of existing stochastic models characterizing the operating policies that regulate data transmission. We extend such models by considering data with various level of importance generated by the device with variable rate at the edge of energetic sustainability. We show that under these conditions the usual gap between efficient operating policies and simple greedy transmission becomes even more relevant, thus justifying the need for an efficient management of the energy resource in battery-constrained devices.