Performance of Communication Systems with RF Energy-harvesting and Processing Cost

Processing energy can limit the performance of a communication system. In this paper, we consider a point-to-point link, with an everlasting power supply since the base station (BS) broadcasts energy to the energy harvesting (EH) information transmitter. It employs "harvest-then-transmit" mechanism, as it spends all of it's energy harvested during the previous BS energy broadcast as fixed power consumption for the processing circuitry, and the rest to transmit the information towards the BS. Assuming time division multiple access (TDMA), we propose a novel transmission scheme for jointly optimal allocation of the BS output power and the TDMA time sharing, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes, employing only the optimal time allocation.