Study on Energy Consumption Optimization Strategy for Data Transmission in Wireless Networks

The limited battery lifetime of a wireless device, which is directly related to the better experience of the wireless network's users, imposes a constraint on network performance. Thus, one of the most significant objectives in wireless networks is to reduce energy consumption of wireless terminals. Considering that the communication is much more energy efficient when the channel conditions are good, we design and propose an energy consumption optimization strategy for data transmission based on optimal stopping theory, with a view of minimizing the energy consumption of a wireless device and prolonging its battery lifetime. Wireless terminals periodically detect the channel to find the moment when the channel state is the best to transmit data under a given transmission delay demand in wireless links. However, the increasing number of channel detection causes the delay of transmitting data, so we introduce a discount function to convert this problem into a discounted secretary problem and finally find out the optimal stopping rule. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy offers significant average energy efficiency of unit data and is quite promising for the research on the energy efficiency of wireless networks.