Exploiting Temporal Correlation in Wireless Channel for Energy-Efficient Communication

Abstract

Widespread adoption of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology depends on cost-affordability of the devices and convenience of their usage in terms of long life. Energy-efficiency of the miniaturized wireless IoT devices is a key to the cost and convenience factors. While there have been a few prior studies on wireless channel adaptive communication strategies, in this paper we relook at the problem aiming at effectively characterizing the wireless fading channel and devising energy-efficient link-layer retransmission strategy suitable for IoT devices. In particular, we propose a new channel-adaptive strategy that depends on the rate of variation of wireless channel irrespective of the underlying channel fading distribution. We further show that the concept of average fade duration dependent retransmission is a special case of the proposed strategy. Extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme most effectively characterizes the temporal variations of wireless channel in comparison with the other existing schemes. Performance of the proposed retransmission strategy is compared with the competitive protocols using the Markov model. Numerical results demonstrate that, the proposed scheme offers a gain of about 9% in terms data throughput and about 12% in terms of energy efficiency in comparison to its nearest existing benchmark scheme.