Energy-efficient multimedia communications in lossy multi-hop wireless networks

A key concern in multi-hop wireless networks is energy-efficiency due to battery-power constrained mobile nodes. The network interface is a significant consumer of energy [7, 8, 15] causing a substantial amount of energy to be wasted by sending packets that cannot be used by the receiver. Given the small MAC layer packet sizes of wireless channels as compared to multimedia application data frames, inter-packet dependencies are formed (i.e., the loss of a single packet renders a group of packets useless). In this paper, we present an application-aware link layer protocol to reduce the energy wasted by sending such useless data in lossy networks.