Energy complexity- a metric for energy consumption of ad hoc network protocols

The key in minimizing system wide energy consumption of a network is to use a protocol stack that is energy sensitive. However, there has been no appropriate metric to correctly evaluate the impact of a protocol strategy on battery-powered devices. This paper presents a method to evaluate minimum energy consumption of a protocol. In this paper, we apply a method, called energy complexity to separately compute minimum energy consumption due to transmissions, receptions, and protocol specific local computations for a protocol control-message transmission and data transmission strategies. This method can also be used to analytically experiment with protocols by changing their control-message and/or data transmission strategies. The usefulness of our method is demonstrated by analyzing two routing protocols for sensor networks.