Broadcasting with an energy harvesting rechargeable transmitter

In this paper, we investigate the transmission completion time minimization problem in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) broadcast channel, where the transmitter is able to harvest energy from the nature, using a rechargeable battery. The harvested energy is modeled to arrive at the transmitter during the course of transmissions. The transmitter has a fixed number of packets to be delivered to each receiver. The objective is to minimize the time by which all of the packets are delivered to their respective destinations. To this end, we optimize the transmit powers and transmission rates in a deterministic setting. We first analyze the structural properties of the optimal transmission policy in a two-user broadcast channel via the dual problem of maximizing the departure region by a fixed time T. We prove that the optimal total transmit power sequence has the same structure as the optimal single-user transmit power sequence in. In addition, the total power is split optimally based on a cut-off power level; if the total transmit power is lower than this cut-off level, all transmit power is allocated to the stronger user; otherwise, all transmit power above this level is allocated to the weaker user. We then extend our analysis to an M-user broadcast channel. We show that the optimal total power sequence has the same structure as the two-user case and optimally splitting the total power among M users involves M-1 cut-off power levels. Using this structure, we propose an algorithm that finds the globally optimal policy. Our algorithm is based on reducing the broadcast channel problem to a single-user problem as much as possible. Finally, we illustrate the optimal policy and compare its performance with several suboptimal policies under different settings.