Stability of Control Systems with Feedback from Energy Harvesting Sensors

In this paper, we study the problem of certifying the stability of a closed loop system which receives feedback from an energy harvesting sensor. This is important, as energy harvesting sensors are recharged stochastically, and may only be able to provide feedback intermittently. Thus, stabilizing plants with feedback provided by energy harvesting sensors is challenging in that the feedback signal is only available stochastically, complicating the analysis of the closed-loop system. As the main contribution of the paper, we show that for a broad class of energy harvesting processes and transmission policies, the system can be modeled as a Markov jump linear system (MJLS), which thereby enables a rigorous stability analysis. We discuss the types of transmission policies and energy harvesting processes which can be accommodated in detail, demonstrating the generality of the results.