A Comprehensive View of Wireless Link Energy Efficiency

Energy efficiency of wireless links is very important in modern communication systems. A survey of papers evaluating energy efficiency however shows that evaluation approaches are not consistent, resulting in calculations that are not comparable with each other. Indeed, even the units of the various energy efficiency evaluations are not identical. To address this problem a new model is developed here that takes into account the many dependencies among multiple wireless link parameters important to evaluating energy efficiency of the link. The unit of bits per joule is adopted for this new model. This new model is evaluated for five deployed wireless links that have very different parameters and operating objectives. The need to establish standardized cases to allow direct comparisons is identified and discussed.