Events

Energy Harvesting Communication System with Battery Constraint and Leakage

Lecture / Panel
 
For NYU Community

Speaker: Dr. Deniz Gunduz

Faculty Host: Professor Elza Erkip

Abstract

Energy efficient operation is a key challenge in the sustainable deployment of battery-powered communication systems. Applications such as wireless sensor networks depend strictly on the lifetime of individual sensors, whose batteries are limited due to physical constraints as well as cost considerations. Harvesting energy from the environment is an important alternative for such systems to extend their lifetime. However, it is important to design the system operation based on the energy harvesting process to increase the efficiency, since most transmission schemes assume the availability of energy in the battery at all times (until the battery drains), and the system is assumed to be ‘dead’ once the battery drains.

Our focus in this talk is on a single point-to-point link, and our goal is to maximize the amount of data that is transmitted to the receiver under various assumptions regarding the energy harvesting model as well as the battery limitations. We first introduce the problem of transmitted data maximization in an energy harvesting system under general energy-harvesting models and battery limitations. Our framework can model continuous energy harvesting, generalizing packetized energy arrivals studied in the literature, as well as battery degradation over time. We characterize the optimal offline transmission strategy for this model. We then introduce another realistic aspect of an energy harvesting system by considering battery-leakage, and identify the optimal transmission strategy under the assumption of a constant leakage rate.

About the Speaker

Eugenio Culurciello (S'97-M'99) received the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2004 from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. In July 2004 he joined the department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University, where he is currently an associate professor and directs the ‘e-Lab’ laboratory. His research interest is in analog and mixed-mode integrated circuits for biomedical instrumentation, synthetic vision, bio-inspired sensory systems and networks, biological sensors, silicon-on-insulator design. Eugenio Culurciello is the recipient of The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and Young Investigator Program from ONR, the Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE (CASS), and is the author of the book "Silicon-on-Sapphire Circuits and Systems, Sensor and Biosensor interfaces" published by McGraw Hill in 2009.