Transmission Power Scheduling for Energy Harvesting Sensor in Remote State Estimation

We study remote estimation in a wireless sensor network. Instead of using a conventional battery-powered sensor, a sensor equipped with an energy harvester which can obtain energy from the external environment is utilized. We formulate this problem into an infinite time-horizon Markov decision process and provide the optimal sensor transmission power control strategy. In addition, a sub-optimal strategy which is easier to implement and requires less computation is presented. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the implementation of the sub-optimal policy and evaluation of its estimation performance.