A New Approach to Dynamically Trade off Performance and Energy Consumption in Wireless Communication Systems

This paper describes work undertaken in the context of the IST-200134157 Power aware Communications for Wireless OptiMised personal Area Network (PACWOMAN). The IST program is partially funded by the EC. 3 Bruno Bougard is PhD student at K.U.Leuven, granted by the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders (FWO Vlanderen) ABSTRACT The current demand in increasing data rate and quality of service in wireless communication has to cope with an energy budget severely constrained by autonomy and ubiquity requirements. Trading off performance and energy consumption deserves highest attention to enable the ”anything, anywhere, anytime” paradigm. However, wireless systems are traditionally dimensioned according to worst-case context scenarios where the high dynamism of the propagation environment and the user requirements are not exploited. To exploit this dynamism, potentially enabling disruptive energy reduction, we propose a novel approach to trade off performance and energy by regularly reconfiguring the system in order to match the user requirements in given propagation conditions with the minimal total energy consumption. Simulations for a representative scenario show that the total energy consumption can be reduced by a factor 2 to 20 (depending on the channel conditions) while considering system-level parameters only. Moreover, comparing the system dynamism with typical environmentand user-related time constants shows that implementing the configuration optimization at runtime with the proposed approach can be done with very limited overhead.