Stochastic Routing and Scheduling Policies for Energy Harvesting Communication Networks

摘要

In this paper, we study the joint routing-scheduling problem in energyharvesting communication networks. Our policies, which are based on stochasticsubgradient methods on the dual domain, act as an energy harvesting variant ofthe stochastic family of backpresure algorithms. Specifically, we propose twopolicies: (i) the Stochastic Backpressure with Energy Harvesting (SBP-EH), inwhich a node's routing-scheduling decisions are determined by the differencebetween the Lagrange multipliers associated to their queue stabilityconstraints and their neighbors'; and (ii) the Stochastic Soft Backpressurewith Energy Harvesting (SSBP-EH), an improved algorithm where therouting-scheduling decision is of a probabilistic nature. For both policies, weshow that given sustainable data and energy arrival rates, the stability of thedata queues over all network nodes is guaranteed. Numerical results corroboratethe stability guarantees and illustrate the minimal gap in performance that ourpolicies offer with respect to classical ones which work with an unlimitedenergy supply.