Impact of Limiting Hop Count on the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

In this study, we present a novel family of mixed integer programming (MIP) models to analyze the effects of limiting hop count on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) lifetime. We performed analysis to uncover the trade-off between minimizing the number of hops and maximizing the network lifetime by exploring the parameter space through numerical evaluations of the optimization models. Our results reveal that minimum hop routing leads to significant decrease in network lifetime (up to 40%) when compared to the maximum network lifetime obtained without any restrictions on hop count. However, the decrease in network lifetime is negligible if the minimum hop routing criterion is modestly relaxed (e.g., 3% decrease in network lifetime is possible if the minimum hop count is increased by 15%).