Optimal Update for Energy Harvesting Sensor with Reliable Backup Energy

Abstract

In this paper, we consider an information update system where a wireless sensor sends timely updates to the destination over an erasure channel with the supply of harvested energy and reliable backup energy. The metric Age of Information(AoI) is adopted to measure the timeliness of the received updates at the destination. We aim to find the optimal information updating policy that minimizes the time-average weighted sum of the AoI and the reliable backup energy cost by formulating an infinite state Markov decision process(MDP). The optimal information updating policy is proved to have a threshold structure. Based on this special structure, an algorithm for efficiently computing the optimal policy is proposed. Numerical results show that the optimal updating policy proposed outperforms baseline policies.

Optimal Information Update for Energy Harvesting Sensor with Reliable Backup Energy

“…To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to consider the timeliness of the system under mixed energy supplies. The preliminary results of this paper are presented in [ 40 ].…”