Energy-efficient Packet Transmission over a Multiaccess Channel

We investigate the minimum-energy packet scheduling problem for the multiaccess channel with K transmitters and a single receiver, assuming that packets arrive at each transmitter’s buffer at arbitrary times and must be transmitted within a finite time window. The offline scheduling problem is formulated and found to be a convex optimization problem with linear constraints. An efficient algorithm for finding the optimal offline schedule is presented. An online schedule based on a lookahead buffer is described and shown to perform very closely in terms of average energy per packet to the offline optimal, at the expense of a nearly constant delay.