A Small World Network Model for Energy Efficient Wireless Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks can be modeled as small world networks based on the complex network theory. In this letter, we propose a new energy efficient small world network model which considers the battery energy of the wireless nodes, the multi-hop transmission distance and the geographical distance between wireless nodes. In order to quantify the energy efficiency of the proposed model, we propose a new energy efficiency metric which jointly considers: 1) the energy efficiency of the wireless links, and 2) the impact of a wireless node on the entire network. By adopting the proposed metric, we evaluate the energy efficiency of each wireless node and the entire network. Our results show that the proposed model: 1) follows the small world feature, and 2) is more energy efficient compared to a random network.