ENERGY-CONSTRAINED ERROR CONTROL FOR WIRELESS CHANNELS

When terminals powered by a finite battery source are used for wireles s communications, energy constraints are likely to influence the choic e of error control protocols. Therefore, we propose the average number of correctly transmitted packets during the lifetime of the battery a s a new metric. In particular, we study the Go-Back-N retransmission p rotocol operating over a wireless channel using a finite energy source with a flat power profile. We characterize the sensitivity of the tot al number of correctly transmitted packets to the choice of the output power level. We then generalize our results to arbitrary power profil es through both a recursive technique and Markov analysis. Finally, we compare the performance of Go-Back-N with an adaptive error control p rotocol that slows down the transmission rate when the channel is impa ired, and document the advantages.