Maximizing energy efficiency for loss tolerant applications: The packet buffering case

Energy efficient communication has emerged as one of the key areas of research due to its impact on industry and environment. Any potential degree of freedom (DoF) available in the system should be exploited smartly to design energy efficient systems. This paper proposes a framework for achieving energy efficiency for the data loss tolerant applications by exploiting the multiuser diversity and DoFs available through the packet loss pattern. For a real time application, there is a constraint on the maximum number of packets to be dropped successively that must be obeyed. We propose a channel-aware energy efficient scheduling scheme which schedules the packets such that the constraint on the average packet drop rate and the maximum number of successively dropped packets is fulfilled for the case when a finite number of unscheduled packets can be buffered. We analyze the scheme in the large user limit and show the energy gain due to buffering on the proposed scheme.