Optimal Quality-of-Service Scheduling for Energy-Harvesting Powered Wireless Communications

In this paper, a new dynamic string tautening algorithm is proposed to generate the most energy-efficient off-line schedule for delay-limited traffic of transmitters with non-negligible circuit power. The algorithm is based on two key findings that we derive through judicious convex formulation and resultant optimality conditions, specifies a set of simple but optimal rules, and generates the optimal schedule with a low complexity of O(N-2) in the worst case. The proposed algorithm is also extended to on-line scenarios, where the transmit schedule is generated on-the-fly. Simulation shows that the proposed algorithm requires substantially lower average complexity by almost two orders of magnitude to retain optimality than general convex solvers. The effective transmit region, specified by the tradeoff of the data arrival rate and the energy harvesting rate, is substantially larger using our algorithm than using other existing alternatives. Significantly more data or less energy can be supported in the proposed algorithm.