  We consider an energy harvesting transmitter sending status updates to a
receiver over an erasure channel, where each status update is of length $k$
symbols. The energy arrivals and the channel erasures are independent and
identically distributed (i.i.d.) and Bernoulli distributed in each slot. In
order to combat the effects of the erasures in the channel and the uncertainty
in the energy arrivals, we use channel coding to encode the status update
symbols. We consider two types of channel coding: maximum distance separable
(MDS) codes and rateless erasure codes. For each of these models, we study two
achievable schemes: best-effort and save-and-transmit. In the best-effort
scheme, the transmitter starts transmission right away, and sends a symbol if
it has energy. In the save-and-transmit scheme, the transmitter remains silent
in the beginning in order to save some energy to minimize energy outages in
future slots. We analyze the average age of information (AoI) under each of
these policies. We show through numerical results that as the average recharge
rate decreases, MDS coding with save-and-transmit outperforms all best-effort
schemes. We show that rateless coding with save-and-transmit outperforms all
the other schemes.
