Is TCP energy efficient?

We analyze the energy consumption performance of various versions of TCP, for bulk data transfer in an environment where channel errors are correlated. We focus on a single wireless TCP connection and model the packet loss or error process as a first-order Markov chain. We compute the throughput and energy performance of various versions of TCP. The main findings of this study are that (1) error correlations significantly affect the energy performance of TCP consistent with analogous conclusions for throughput; and (2) the congestion control mechanism implemented by TCP does a good job at saving energy as well, by backing off and idling during error bursts. An interesting conclusion is that, unlike throughput, the energy efficiency metric may be very sensitive to the TCP version used and to the choice of the protocol parameters