This project seeks to establish fundamental performance limits and the ensuing design principles for wireless communication networks composed of devices that operate with energy harvested from the environment. These energy harvesting systems are envisioned to enable energy self-sufficient, energy self-sustaining, perpetually operating wireless networks, and untethered mobility. As such, they will enable new societal, medical, environmental, monitoring/surveillance and safety applications which are otherwise difficult or impossible with conventional battery-powered operation. These applications range from enabling perpetual remote environmental monitoring and surveillance, structural monitoring to on and in-body networking for health monitoring, medical diagnosis and treatment.
The project identifies the randomness, intermittency, and causality of energy availability, as well as the uncertainty about the energy states of the transmitters at the receivers, as new ingredients to be incorporated in determining the fundamental performance limits of energy harvesting wireless communication systems, and seeks to determine the information theoretic capacity of an energy harvesting link and the accompanying optimum coding and transmission scheme by incorporating energy harvesting constraints into the information theoretic capacity formulation. The project also seeks to identify the information capacity of multi-user, multi-hop, cooperative energy harvesting networks, as well as incorporating practical issues such as imperfections in storage and retrieval of energy to/from battery, leakage of energy over time, etc., into rigorous information theoretic capacity formulations. Furthermore, the project will make connections to estimation, privacy and security by investigating state amplification, state masking and secure data transmission problems.
