ABSTRACT
Radio access technologies (RATs) of 3G emerging toward 4G offer high data rates for multimedia applications of mobile users, contrary to simple voice and SMS rate-limited applications of the past. The extra bandwidth exploitation, combined with the employment of high size modulation constellations and power link control to enhance spectral efficiency and mitigate interference effects, leads to extremely high levels of power consumption and consequently to high energy consumption at mobile users’ devices [1]. In contrast, the improvement in battery technology is much slower, increasing by a modest 10% every 2 years, leading to an exponentially increasing gap between the demand for energy and the battery energy offered. The prospects are even worse in case of novel shrinking size mobile devices that possess batteries with limited energy resources. Therefore, battery life becomes a critical resource and certain aspects should be revisited in designing energyefficient network protocols for the PHY layer up to the applications layer of network protocol stack.
