On the Effective Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

We analytically characterize the energy consumption per successfully transmitted packet in end-to-end packet transmissions in a wireless sensor network where nodes are identically and independently distributed in a square area following a homogeneous Poisson process. It is assumed that a greedy forwarding protocol is used for routing. We obtain analytical results on the average number of hops between any two nodes if the transmission is successful and the average number of hops traversed by packets before being dropped if the transmission is unsuccessful. A transmission is unsuccessful if the packet sent from a source to a destination has to be dropped at an intermediate node because the greedy forwarding routing protocol is unable to find a next-hop node that is closer to the destination. Based on the above analysis, we derive the effective energy consumption per successfully transmitted packet. We show that there exists an optimum transmission range which minimizes the effective energy consumption and such optimum transmission range can be computed based on our analysis.