Abstract
This paper investigates the resource allocation problem for the Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC) with conferencing links, where the two transmitters can talk to each other via wired rate-limited channels. Moreover, the two transmitters are powered by a shared energy harvester which captures energy from the environment. We consider both the non-causal (the energy arrival levels at future time slots are known before transmissions) and the causal (only the energy arrival levels of past and present slots are known) energy-harvesting (EH) models. For the non-causal case, we formulate a resource allocation problem over a finite horizon of N time slots to characterize the boundary of the maximum departure region. We then develop the optimal offline power and rate allocation scheme by exploiting the hidden convexity of this problem. Interestingly, it is shown that there exists a maximum transmission rate (named the capping rate) for one of the transmitters. For the causal case, we examine the performance of the greedy scheme, in which the energy is depleted within each slot. In particular, we measure the utility of this scheme against the optimal offline one by competitive analysis, where the competitive ratio of the online greedy scheme, i.e., the maximum ratio between the profits obtained by the offline and online schemes over arbitrary energy arrival profiles, is derived.