Resource Allocation for Energy Harvesting Communications

With the rapid development of energy harvesting technologies, a new paradigm of wireless communications that employs energy harvesting transmitters has become a reality. The renewable energy source enables the flexible deployment of the transmitters and prolongs their lifetimes. To make the best use of the harvested energy, many challenging research issues arise from the new paradigm of communications. In particular, optimal resource (energy, bandwidth, etc.) allocation is key to the design of an efficient wireless system powered by renewable energy sources. In this thesis, we focus on several resource allocation problems for energy harvesting communications, including the energy allocation for a single energy harvesting transmitter, and the joint energy and spectral resource allocation for energy harvesting networks. More specifically, the resource allocation problems discussed in this thesis are summarized as follows. We solve the problem of designing an affordable optimal energy allocation strategy for the system of energy harvesting active networked tags (EnHANTs), that is adapted to the identification request and the energy harvesting dynamic. We formulate a Markov decision pr