Fundamental Relationships between Energy and Delay in Streaming

摘要

This paper considers the problem of continuously streaming bits over a AWGN channel, a simple model of video or audio streaming. The bits are required to be decoded with a maximum delay, a deadline, of d. The question the paper seeks to answer is: what is the fundamental cost of the deadline in terms of energy per bit E_b? The paper answers this question for a number of cases, depending on the bandwidth available for transmission. A common conclusion is that for an excess energy of ΔE_b, i.e., the energy above that required in the limit d →∞, the required delay is d ~ΔE_-2 which is much worse than the linear relationship between bandwidth and E_b~(-1).