  Energy harvesting (EH) has recently emerged as a promising technique for
green communications. To realize its potential, communication protocols need to
be redesigned to combat the randomness of the harvested energy. In this paper,
we investigate how to apply relaying to improve the short-term performance of
EH communication systems. With an EH source and a non-EH half-duplex relay, we
consider two different design objectives: 1) short-term throughput
maximization; and 2) transmission completion time minimization. Both problems
are joint scheduling and power allocation problems, rendered quite challenging
by the half-duplex constraint at the relay. A key finding is that directional
water-filling (DWF), which is the optimal power allocation algorithm for the
single-hop EH system, can serve as guideline for the design of two-hop
communication systems, as it not only determines the value of the optimal
performance, but also forms the basis to derive optimal solutions for both
design problems. Based on a relaxed energy profile along with the DWF
algorithm, we derive key properties of the optimal solutions for both problems
and thereafter propose efficient algorithms. Simulation results will show that
both scheduling and power allocation optimizations are necessary in two-hop EH
communication systems.
