Maximizing Spectral Efficiency for Energy Harvesting-Aware WBAN

In this paper, we investigate the spectral efficiency of a communication link in a wireless body area network (WBAN) capable of harvesting energy from the environment. We consider two scenarios for the transmission which are single- and dual-hop and achieve the power management policy for each scenario. In the first scenario, the aim is to maximize the link's spectral efficiency over N time slots subject to the battery capacity, energy harvesting constraint, and WBAN limitations including power and outage probability. In the second scenario, a decode-and-forward relay node is considered, and a spectral efficiency optimization problem with constraints similar to the first scenario is evaluated. In addition, since the channel distribution information is available at the transmitters, the lower and upper bounds of the average spectral efficiency are also derived in both scenarios. Finally, numerical results corroborate the analytical results.