Energy-constrained error control for wireless channels

When terminals powered by a finite battery source are used for wireless communications, energy constraints are likely to influence the choice of error control protocols. Therefore, we propose the average number of correctly transmitted packets during the lifetime of the battery as a new metric. In particular, we study the go-back-N retransmission protocol operating over a wireless channel using a finite energy source with a flat power profile. We characterize the sensitivity of the total number of correctly transmitted packets to the choice of the output power level. We then generalize our results to arbitrary power profiles through both a recursive technique and Markov analysis. Finally, we compare the performance of go-back-N with an adaptive error control protocol that slows down the transmission rate when the channel is impaired, and document the advantages.