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

How to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the primary challenges when design and deploy WSNs. Following our previous theoretical and numerical work, we mainly focus on studying the relationship between energy consumption and hop number from an experimental point of view in this paper. Actually, the importance of hop number to the energy consumption is commonly neglected by most routing protocols and a considerable amount of energy can be saved if the relationship between them were carefully studied. A considerable amount of experiments have been made to study the practical design parameters under practical sensor network environment. We validate our judging criteria of transmission manner and transmission radius from both theoretical and experimental aspects. Also, energy aware multi-hop transmission is thoroughly studied so that it lays a solid foundation for our future research.