Wireless transmission using non-contiguous chunks of spectrum is becoming increasingly important due to a variety of scenarios such as: secondary users avoiding incumbent users in TV white space; anticipated spectrum sharing between commercial and military systems; and spectrum sharing among uncoordinated interferers in unlicensed bands. Multi-Channel Multi-Radio (MCMR) platforms and Non-Contiguous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (NC-OFDMA) technology are the two commercially viable transmission choices to access these non-contiguous spectrum chunks. Fixed MC-MRs do not scale with increasing number of non-contiguous spectrum chunks due to their fixed set of supporting radio front ends. NC-OFDMA allows nodes to access these non-contiguous spectrum chunks and put null sub-carriers in the remaining chunks. However, nulling sub-carriers increases the sampling rate (spectrum span) which, in turn, increases the power consumption of radio front ends. Our work characterizes this trade-off from a cross-layer perspective, specifically by showing how the slope of ADC DAC power consumption versus sampling rate curve influences scheduling decisions in a multi-hop network. Specifically, we provide a branch and bound algorithm based mixed integer linear programming solution that performs joint power control, spectrum span selection, scheduling and routing in order to minimize the system power of multi-hop NC-OFDMA networks. We also provide a low complexity (O(E^2 M^2)) greedy algorithm where M and E denote the number of channels and links respectively. Numerical simulations suggest that our approach reduces system power by 30 over classical transmit power minimization based cross-layer algorithms.
Wireless systems where the nodes operate on batteries so that energy consumption must be minimized while satisfying given throughput and delay requirements are considered. In this context, the best modulation strategy to minimize the total energy consumption required to send a given number of bits is analyzed. The total energy consumption includes both the transmission energy and the circuit energy consumption. For uncoded systems, by optimizing the transmission time and the modulation parameters, it is shown that up to 80 energy savings is achievable over nonoptimized systems. For coded systems, it is shown that the benefit of coding varies with the transmission distance and the underlying modulation schemes. Energy-efficient link adaptation is studied for transmission on a frequency-selective parallel AWGN channel. The total power dissipation model includes a circuit power that varies with the sum rate and a power amplifier efficiency that varies with the bandwidth used. The mathematical analysis provides insight into how the subcarrier rates should be chosen for optimal energy efficiency and suggests a simple fixed-point algorithm that finds the solution in few iterations. Moreover, ways of improving the energy efficiency are discussed based on the dependence on bandwidth and distance between transmitter and receiver. Traditional communication theory focuses on minimizing transmit power. However, communication links are increasingly operating at shorter ranges where transmit power can be significantly smaller than the power consumed in decoding. This paper models the required decoding power and investigates the minimization of total system power from two complementary perspectives. First, an isolated point-to-point link is considered. Using new lower bounds on the complexity of message-passing decoding, lower bounds are derived on decoding power. These bounds show that 1) there is a fundamental tradeoff between transmit and decoding power; 2) unlike the implications of the traditional "waterfall" curve which focuses on transmit power, the total power must diverge to infinity as error probability goes to zero; 3) Regular LDPCs, and not their known capacity-achieving irregular counterparts, can be shown to be power order optimal in some cases; and 4) the optimizing transmit power is bounded away from the Shannon limit. Second, we consider a collection of links. When systems both generate and face interference, coding allows a system to support a higher density of transmitter-receiver pairs (assuming interference is treated as noise). However, at low densities, uncoded transmission may be more power-efficient in some cases. 