Analysis of Energy Consumption in Direct Transmission and Multi-hop Transmission for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we primary focus on prolonging the network lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSN), since the small, portable batteries integrated into the sensor chips can not be re-charged easily from an economical point of view. We first made a further analysis about the relationship between energy consumption and hop number. Then, an optimal hop number is deduced for minimizing the energy consumption during the multi-hop transmission. The importance of hop number to the energy consumption is usually neglected by many routing protocols. In fact, a considerable amount of energy can be saved if the relationship between hop number and energy consumption is carefully studied. After further analysis about the energy consumption of different transmission manner as well as design parameters, we presented our judging criterion of transmission manner. Also, an energy efficient routing scenario is presented with diagram so as to illustrate how the network lifetime can be prolonged.