Energy considerations for topology-unaware TDMA MAC protocols

Since the energy budget of mobile nodes is limited, the performance of a networking protocol for such users should be evaluated in terms of its energy efficiency, in addition to the more traditional metrics such as throughput. In this paper, two topology-unaware MAC protocols—in which the scheduling time slots are allocated irrespectively of the underline topology—are considered and their energy consumption is derived. It turns out that the per frame power consumption is lower for the less throughput-efficient protocol, suggesting that energy savings are achieved at the expense of throughput.A finer energy consumption study is carried out in the sequel, focusing on the amount of energy consumed to successfully transmit a certain number of packets, or equivalently, on the per successful transmission power consumption. It is shown that the more throughput-efficient protocol consumes less energy per successful transmission under certain conditions (which are derived), due to the lower number of transmission attempts before a data packet is successfully transmitted. The same energy-efficiency relation is observed under certain conditions (which are derived) when data packets are delay constrained and, thus, may become obsolete if not transmitted successfully within a specific time interval. The conditions under which the per successful transmission power consumption is minimized for delay-constrained packets, are also established in this work and it is observed that when the system throughput is maximized, the power consumed is close to the minimum. Simulation results support the claims and the expectations of the aforementioned analysis.