NXG04-3: Does Multi-hop Communication Extend the Battery Life of Mobile Terminals?

Multi-hop cellular communication has been proposed mainly to overcome some of the short-comings of cellular networks. Increasing network capacity and reducing energy consumption are amongst the promised advantages of this concept. In this paper, energy consumption in multi-hop CDMA cellular networks is investigated with the objective of quantifying the resulting effect. Reducing energy consumption in CDMA cellular networks, using multi-hop communication, is shown to be possible. Furthermore, comparing multi-hop cellular networks with and without power control, it is shown that power control further reduces energy consumption - especially with small number of hops. The effect of varying the hardware specifications is also studied. It is shown that multi-hopping is more effective in environments with high path loss.