Energy efficiency analysis of a multichannel wireless access protocol

When user terminals powered by a finite battery source are used for wireless communications, energy constraints are likely to influence the design/choice of media access protocols. We analyze the energy efficiency of a multichannel wireless access protocol using a finite energy source in a mobile radio environment. The average number of correctly transmitted packets for a given amount of allocated energy is used as the appropriate energy efficiency metric. The mobile radio channel itself is characterized by a correlated Rayleigh fading process, whose memory parameters depend on the speed of the user terminal, the data rate, and the physics of the channel. We show that the protocol which recovers erroneous data packets through retransmission is more energy efficient at low channel correlations.