Theoretical Model For Maximum Throughput of a Radio Receiver with Limited Battery Power

Maximizing the battery life time of mobile devices and sensor nodes increasingly becomes a challenge. In many applications the energy consumed by the receiver is orders of magnitude larger than the energy consumed by the transmitter. We address the challenge of achieving the highest possible throughput per Watt of available receiver circuit power. Our closed form solution allows us to formalize the relation between adjacent channel interference power and achievable throughput for a given available receiver circuit power budget. We conclude that for a given adjacent channel interference level, there is an optimum receiver power that needs to be applied to operate the link at optimum efficiency in terms of bits per Joule. If the receiver has less power available than this optimum, it preferably applies a duty cycling scheme, switching between an off state and operation at the optimum power. This observation is contrast to commonly used capacity models where throughput is limited by transmit power.