Reliability tradeoffs for energy efficient wireless networks

A complex wireless deployment under realistic scenario is prone to failures and it becomes very hard to determine when to stop retransmitting a message in order to ensure proper delivery. In this paper, a simple effective link-attribute estimator is proposed that is capable of identifying the quality of communication between neighboring mobile devices while maintaining the scalability. By relying on our link-quality estimator, a maximum number of attempts is computed which (probabilistically) ensures the message delivery while maintaining energy-efficiency. Through appropriate adjustments, our estimator is capable of obtaining the bounds on the number of retransmission attempts required to increase the message delivery ratio. This enables wireless devices to establish a threshold on the number of transmission attempts, thereby avoiding those retransmissions that would only result in wasted energy. Such dynamic threshold helps enforce at least a minimum number of transmission. Simulations prove the effectiveness of our LQ estimator with respect to energy efficiency and message delivery reliability. Results indicate that an acceptable message delivery ratio can be maintained while increasing the overall energy efficiency.