Energy-Efficient Deadline-Constrained Maximum Reliability Forwarding in Lossy Networks

This paper studies the problem of optimal forwarding for reliable and energy-efficient real-time communication over multi-hop wireless lossy networks. We impose a strict per-packet latency bound and develop forwarding policies that maximize the probability that the packet is delivered within the specified deadline minus a transmission energy cost. A solution to this problem allows to characterize the set of achievable latency-reliability pairs and to trace out the Pareto frontier between achievable deadline-constrained reliability and transmission energy cost. We develop dynamic programming-based solutions under a finite-state Markov channel model. Particular instances with Bernoulli and Gilbert-Elliot loss models that admit numerically efficient solutions are discussed and our results are demonstrated on several examples.