Energy-efficient multi-hop transmission for machine-to-machine communications

Emerging machine-to-machine communication scenarios are envisioned to deal with more stringent quality-of-service demands. This relates mainly to outage and latency requirements, which are for example for safety-critical messages quite different than for traditional applications. On the other hand, it is widely accepted that machine-to-machine communication systems need to be energy-efficient because of the widespread use of battery-powered devices, but also due to their huge deployment numbers. In this paper, we address these issues with respect to multi-hop transmissions. Specifically, we deal with minimizing the consumed energy of transmitting a packet with end-to-end outage and latency requirements. We account for the cases in which the system can utilize solely average channel state information, or in addition obtain and profit from instantaneous channel state information. The developed solution is based on convex optimization. It is shown numerically that despite accounting for the energy consumption of acquiring instantaneous channel state information, especially as the outage and latency requirements become tough, it is by up to 100 times more energy efficient to convey a packet with instantaneous than with average channel state information.