A transport layer approach to improve energy efficiency

Incorporating energy efficiency into the design of modern communication systems has become an important area of research. However, while most of the proposed solutions are devoted to making network hardware energy efficient, very few works focus on energy efficiency as a fundamental design parameter of network protocols. This paper proposes an analytical model for energy consumption of TCP which relates energy consumption to protocol operation cycles. Based on this model a number of optimization techniques are proposed to reduce energy consumption of TCP. The experiments, performed using NS2 simulations, demonstrate that energy savings can be as high as 93% for multiple TCP flows.