Cross-layer design of energy efficient coded ARQ systems

The energy efficient design of coded automatic-repeat-request (ARQ) systems is studied in this paper. The optimization aims to minimize the energy required for the successfully delivery of one information bit from a transmitter to a receiver. The design is performed by incorporating a wide range of practical system parameters and metrics, such as hardware power consumption, modulation, channel coding, and frame error rate (FER) in the physical layer, and frame length and protocol overhead in the media access control layer. A new log-domain threshold approximation method is proposed to analytically quantify the impacts of the various system parameters on the FER, and the results are used to facilitate the system design. The optimum transmission energy and frame length that minimize the energy per information bit are identified in closed-form expressions as functions of the various practical system parameters. The analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the total energy consumption in a coded ARQ system can be reduced by increasing the transmission energy during one transmission attempt, and significant energy saving as high as 9.5 dB is achieved with the optimum system.