Abstract-In this paper, a half-duplex two-way relay channel with energy harvesting nodes is considered. In particular, shortterm throughput maximization problems are solved using a decode-and-forward relay. Necessary properties of the optimal transmission policy are derived to gain insights into the optimal solution. Then, a subgradient descent algorithm is used to find the optimal policy. It is observed through simulations that energydeficient nodes act as bottlenecks on the achieved throughput. The achieved average throughput is observed to be close to the upper bound when nodes have no energy intermittency, and significantly higher than the throughput achieved by naïve policies.
I. INTRODUCTIONWe consider a bidirectional relay channel with energy harvesting nodes. Efficient energy management is required when dealing with such nodes since they harvest energy out of external sources in an intermittent fashion.Recently, there has been considerable interest in energy harvesting networks [1]- [13]. A single-user wireless communication system is considered in [1] with random energy and data arrivals at the source. A piece-wise constant transmit power policy where the node transmits with constant power in intervals longest in duration while staying energy feasible, is shown to be optimal. Reference [2] considers the throughput maximization problem when the amount of energy that the battery can store is limited. The two problems in [1], [2] are observed to be related, and the optimal policy is shown to follow the shortest path within the feasible energy tunnel [2]. In [3], the extension of this model to fading channels is addressed. A single link scenario with an energy harvesting transmitter and receiver is analyzed in [4]. Multiple access, broadcast and interference channels with energy harvesting transmitters are considered in [5]-[9]. In addition to these multi-user setups, special cases of the energy harvesting relay channel problem have been studied in [10], [11], where it is noted that the problem becomes more challenging with a halfduplex relay and a data buffer at the relay.In this work, we consider the two-way relay channel with energy harvesting nodes. The channel is two-hop in the sense that the transmitters cannot hear each other directly, i.e., communication is possible only through the relay. We consider a decode-and-forward relay [14], [15] operating in