In this paper, we propose an optimal control policy based on time-ratio and transmission power allocation in wireless body area networks (WBANs), where the duty cycle is adopted. For the purpose of maximizing the information throughput, the whole duty cycle is divided into two states: sleep state and active state. During the sleep state, in order to transmit information from senor, the energy harvested in the sensor must exceed a certain threshold. In the active state, the process of transmitting information by the sensor will cause interference to energy harvesting. To get to a more reasonable and convictive optimization goal, we optimize the duty-cycle time-ratio of sleep and active states and transmission power in active state simultaneously in the system. The simulation results show that the information throughput is improved significantly when the proposed control policy is considered. INDEX TERMS Wireless body area networks (WBANs), duty cycle, energy harvesting, optimal control policy.