Optimal Transmission Strategy for Solar Harvesting Communication.

We consider a solar harvesting point-to-point communication system, where the transmitter powered by solar energy and equipped with a battery of finite capacity communicates over an AWGN channel. The solar harvesting rate is described by the real data-based quadratic solar power model, which characterizes the solar power levels by a quadratic equation with the time of the day. By analyzing the effect of battery capacity, we consider two cases and propose an optimal transmission strategy for each case to maximize the channel capacity. Furthermore, we prove the optimality of the proposed strategy through the proof by contradiction. We find that for a certain amount of energy, longer transmission time and more uniform energy allocation for transmission lead to greater capacity.