• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.902-912
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• 2016

Recent advances in energy harvesting (EH) technology have motivated the adoption of rechargeable mobile devices for communications. In this paper, we consider a point-to-point (P2P) wireless communication system in which an EH transmitter with a non-ideal rechargeable battery is required to send a given fixed number of bits to the receiver before they expire according to a preset delay constraint. Due to the possible energy loss in the storage process, the harvest-use-and-store (HUS) architecture is adopted. We characterize the properties of the optimal solutions, for additive white Gaussian channels (AWGNs) and then block-fading channels, that maximize the energy efficiency (i.e., battery residual) subject to a given rate requirement. Interestingly, it is shown that the optimal solution has a water-filling interpretation with double thresholds and that both thresholds are monotonic. Based on this, we investigate the optimal double-threshold based allocation policy and devise an algorithm to achieve the solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the theoretical analysis and to compare the optimal solutions with existing schemes.