Energy Optimal Transmission Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the main issues in the design of sensor networks is energy efficient communication of time-critical data. Energy wastage can be caused by failed packet transmission attempts at each node due to channel dynamics and interference. Therefore transmission control techniques that are unaware of the channel dynamics can lead to suboptimal channel use patterns. In this paper the authors propose a transmission controller that utilizes different "Grades" of channel side information to schedule packet transmissions in an optimal way, while meeting a deadline constraint for all packets waiting in the transmission queue.