Uniform thresholding based transmission policy for energy harvesting wireless sensor nodes in fading channel

The work presents a novel computationally efficient transmission policy for throughput maximization over point-to-point sensor links employing harvest-use-store protocol with finite storage capacity battery. In these settings, under finite averaging duration constraint, the stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) technique provides the optimal solution for throughput maximization, but the implementation complexity for SDP is prohibitively large. Thus, there is a need to explore new solutions that can provide near-optimal throughput with lower implementation complexity. The work in this paper presents a adaptive transmission policy based on uniform thresholding that achieves a near-optimal throughput obtainable by SDP. Quantitative comparison with optimal online policies shows that the proposed policy attains performance close to SDP with lower implementation complexity.