From Experience with Indoor Wireless Networks: A Link Quality Metric that Captures Channel Memory

With ARQ based link-layer schemes, energy consumption on a link increases with packet retransmissions. We define the inefficiency of a link as the expected number of transmissions before a packet is successfully received on that link. Memory in the packet success process, caused by long indoor coherence times, strongly influences inefficiency. Based on measurements, we build a simple model for the packet success process that incorporates memory and predicts our metric practically and accurately. In particular, inefficiency is asymptotically linear in the memory duration when there is a nonzero probability of a deep fade, and approximately logarithmic otherwise.