  This paper develops a novel approach to obtaining energy-efficient
transmission schedules for delay-limited bursty data arrivals under non-ideal
circuit power consumption. Assuming a-prior knowledge of packet arrivals,
deadlines and channel realizations, we show that the problem can be formulated
as a convex program. For both time-invariant and time-varying fading channels,
it is revealed that the optimal transmission between any two consecutive
channel or data state changing instants, termed epoch, can only take one of the
three strategies: (i) no transmission, (ii) transmission with an
energy-efficiency (EE) maximizing rate over part of the epoch, or (iii)
transmission with a rate greater than the EE-maximizing rate over the whole
epoch. Based on this specific structure, efficient algorithms are then
developed to find the optimal policies that minimize the total energy
consumption with a low computational complexity. The proposed approach can
provide the optimal benchmarks for practical schemes designed for transmissions
of delay-limited data arrivals, and can be employed to develop efficient online
scheduling schemes which require only causal knowledge of data arrivals and
deadline requirements.
