Bursty Versus Continuous Transmission for Wireless Streaming

This paper analyzes energy consumption in wireless streaming with delay constraints. One fundamental question is whether the transmitter should transmit a steady stream of bits, continuous transmission, or transmit data in bursts and switch off while not transmitting. In the latter case, a question is also for what fraction of time the transmitter should transmit, the duty cycle. In this paper we use traditional and finite blocklength information theory to see whether bursty transmission would be better than transmitting data continuously. When doing this analysis we consider latency and energy efficiency, two fundamental parameters that characterize communication systems. We take into account realistic models of hardware, including overhead power, power amplifier inefficiency and the receiver noise factor. With these models we find that the energy consumption and latency tradeoff behaves quite differently from the ideal case.