Energy-efficient scheduling with individual packet delay constraints and non-ideal circuit power

Exploiting the energy-delay tradeoff for energy saving is critical for developing green wireless communication systems. In this paper, we investigate the delay-constrained energy-efficient packet transmission. We aim to minimize the energy consumption of multiple randomly arrived packets in an additive white Gaussian noise channel subject to individual packet delay constraints, by taking into account the practical on-off circuit power consumption at the transmitter. First, we consider the offline case, by assuming that the full packet arrival information is known a priori at the transmitter, and formulate the energy minimization problem as a non-convex optimization problem. By exploiting the specific problem structure, we propose an efficient scheduling algorithm to obtain the globally optimal solution. It is shown that the optimal solution consists of two types of scheduling intervals, namely "selected-off" and "always-on" intervals, which correspond to bits-per-joule energy efficiency maximization and "lazy scheduling" rate allocation, respectively. Next, we consider the practical online case where only causal packet arrival information is available. Inspired by the optimal offline solution, we propose a new online scheme. It is shown by simulations that the proposed online scheme has a comparable performance with the optimal offline one and outperforms the design without considering on-off circuit power as well as the other heuristically designed online schemes.