Exploiting the Timing Channel to Increase Energy Efficiency in Wireless Networks

The timing channel is the logical communication link established between a sender and a receiver in which flowing information is encoded in the timing between events. Accordingly, information can be transferred by means of the transmitted packets, but also through the time interval between such transmissions, and the size of the packets. In wired networks approaches using the timing channel can lead to a small increase in the overall communication capacity. In wireless networks with strict power constraints, instead, these can lead to significant energy efficiency improvements. In fact, part of the information (that encoded in the time interval between transmissions and in the size of the packets) is transferred without its actual transmission. In this paper a methodology is introduced which allows exploitation of the timing channel in wireless networks and an analytical framework is derived for its assessment in case of one-to-one, many-to-one, and one-to-many communications. Numerical results show that the proposed approach increases energy efficiency significantly, especially, when available energy is particularly scarce and precious.