Optimal Scheduling and Power Allocation for Two-Hop Energy Harvesting Communication Systems

Energy Harvesting (EH) has recently emerged as a promising technique for green communications. To realize its potential, communication protocols need to be redesigned to combat the randomness of the harvested energy. In this paper, the authors investigate how to apply relaying to improve the short-term performance of EH communication systems. With an EH source and a non-EH half-duplex relay, they consider two different design objectives: short-term throughput maximization; and transmission completion time minimization. Both problems are joint scheduling and power allocation problems, rendered quite challenging by the half-duplex constraint at the relay.