Opportunistic Wireless Energy Transfer in Point-to-Point Links

Abstract

In this paper we consider wireless energy transfer for a point-to-point link. The energy transmitter sees a finite number of independent channel realizations, and, armed with (causal) knowledge of the channels, must decide how much energy to transmit in each time slot. The objective is to maximize the expected energy transferred to the receiver at the end of the time period. We show that the optimal energy allocation policy is binary: the transmitter sends no energy or all energy in a slot with this decision based on a simple threshold on the channel. As intuition demands, this threshold for transmission decreases as we move closer to the last available time slot. The performance of the optimal scheme is studied both analytically and numerically.Index Terms-Channel estimation, single-input single-output (SISO) network, threshold policy, wireless energy transfer.