Error control and energy consumption in communications for nomadic computing

We consider the problem of communications over a wireless channel in support of data transmissions from the perspective of small portable devices that must rely on limited battery energy. We model the channel outages as statistically correlated errors. Classic ARQ strategies are found to lead to a considerable waste of energy, due to the large number of transmissions. The use of finite energy sources in the face of dependent channel errors leads to new protocol design criteria. As an example, a simple probing scheme, which slows down the transmission rate when the channel is impaired, is shown to be more energy efficient, with a slight loss in throughput. A modified scheme that yields slightly better performance but requires some additional complexity is also studied. Some references on the modeling of battery cells are discussed to highlight the fact that battery charge capacity is strongly influenced by the available ''relaxation time'' between current pulses. A formal approach that can track complex models for power sources, including dynamic charge recovery, is also developed.