Comparing the energy efficiency of single-hop, multi-hop and incremental decode-and-forward in multi-relay wireless sensor networks

In this paper we analyze the energy efficiency of single-hop, multi-hop and incremental decode-and-forward in wireless sensor networks composed of multiple nodes. The energy efficiency analysis is constrained by a target outage probability and an end-to-end throughput, while the Nakagami-m distribution is used to model the small scale fading. Our results show that in most scenarios the cooperative incremental decode-and-forward scheme is more energy efficient than the other methods.