Energy efficiency of CSMA protocols for wireless packet switched networks

The finite battery power in wireless portable computing devices is a motivating factor for developing energy efficient wireless network technologies. This paper investigates energy efficiency, relating it to throughput and packet delay for both non-persistent and p-persistent CSMA, two protocols popularly applied in current wireless networks; for example, the widely adopted IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards are based on p-persistent CSMA. For high message generation by the members of a finite population, we find that non-persistent CSMA has a markedly higher energy efficiency than p-persistent CSMA for all network configurations, though the latter attains a moderately lower packet delay. We also show that when non-persistent CSMA is optimized for energy efficiency, throughput and delay are impacted negatively, whereas p-persistent CSMA can effectively optimize all three with the same network settings. Our results help illuminate the suitability of each CSMA scheme for various wireless environments and applications.