Non-Asymptotic Achievable Rates for Energy-Harvesting Channels using Save-and-Transmit

Abstract

This paper investigates the information-theoretic limits of energy-harvesting (EH) channels in the finite blocklength regime. The EH process is characterized by a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with finite variances. We use the save-and-transmit strategy proposed by Ozel and Ulukus (2012) together with Shannon's non-asymptotic achievability bound to obtain lower bounds on the achievable rates for both additive white Gaussian noise channels and discrete memoryless channels under EH constraints. The first-order terms of the lower bounds of the achievable rates are equal to $C$ and the second-order (backoff from capacity) terms are proportional to $-\sqrt{ \frac{\log n}{n}}$, where $n$ denotes the blocklength and $C$ denotes the capacity of the EH channel, which is the same as the capacity without the EH constraints. The constant of proportionality of the backoff term is found and qualitative interpretations are provided.

Submitted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2nd revision completed; Typos are corrected