The impact of energy constraints on the medium access

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how energy constraints influence medium access in wireless systems, showing that energy-aware strategies can reduce contention and improve the energy--throughput tradeoff in slotted ALOHA scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a stochastic analysis of energy-aware medium access, revealing how energy constraints can be exploited to optimize contention and throughput.

Findings

Energy constraints can reduce medium contention when properly exploited.

Energy-aware strategies improve the energy--throughput tradeoff.

Analysis applies to slotted ALOHA and similar contention-based systems.

Abstract

Contemporary mobile devices are battery powered and due to their shrinking size and increasing complexity operate on a tight energy budget. Thus, energy consumption is becoming one of the major concerns regarding the current and upcoming wireless communication systems. On the other hand, the available bandwidth resources are limited and modern applications are throughput demanding, leading thus to strong competition for the medium. In this direction, we consider a stochastic contention based medium access scheme, where the devices may choose to turn off for some time in order to save energy. We perform an analysis for a slotted ALOHA scenario and we show that the energy constraints, if properly exploited, may reduce contention for the medium. Our results give valuable insights on the energy--throughput tradeoff for any contention based system.