The binary energy harvesting channel with a unit-sized battery

Kaya Tutuncuoglu, Omur Ozel, Aylin Yener, Sennur Ulukus

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    31 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    We consider a binary energy harvesting communication channel with a finite-sized battery at the transmitter. In this model, the channel input is constrained by the available energy at each channel use, which is driven by an external energy harvesting process, the size of the battery, and the previous channel inputs. We consider an abstraction where energy is harvested in binary units and stored in a battery with the capacity of a single unit, and the channel inputs are binary. Viewing the available energy in the battery as a state, this is a statedependent channel with input-dependent states, memory in the states, and causal state information available at the transmitter only. We find an equivalent representation for this channel based on the timings of the symbols, and determine the capacity of the resulting equivalent timing channel via an auxiliary random variable. We present achievable rates based on certain selections of this auxiliary random variable, which resemble lattice coding for the timing channel. We develop upper bounds for the capacity by using a genie-aided method, and also by quantifying the leakage of the state information to the receiver. We show that the proposed achievable rates are asymptotically capacity achieving for small energy harvesting rates. We extend the results to the case of ternary channel inputs. We numerically observe that our achievable rates are notably close to the upper bounds, and outperform basic Shannon strategies that only consider instantaneous battery states, for all parameter values.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article number7892844
    Pages (from-to)4240-4256
    Number of pages17
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Information Theory
    Volume63
    Issue number7
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Jul 2017

    All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

    • Information Systems
    • Computer Science Applications
    • Library and Information Sciences

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