Optimal Threshold-Based Transmission Scheduling Policy For Energy Harvesting Sensor Nodes

This paper considers an energy harvesting sensor node with finite data and energy storage, which transmits data packets with different reward values to its corresponding receiver node. In this regard, we propose an optimal threshold-based transmission scheduling policy for maximizing the long-term average transmission reward. In particular, we first analyze the performance of the proposed threshold-based transmission scheduling policy by studying the steady states of the energy harvesting sensor node and derive its expected transmission reward. We then propose a polynomial-time algorithm to compute these optimal reward value thresholds that maximize the expected reward. Numerical results show that the system expected reward increases with the increase of data and energy storage capacity. Our analysis further shows that the expected reward increases exponentially with the increase of data or energy storage capacity.