Evaluation of Energy Costs for Single Hop vs. Multi Hop with Respect to Topology Parameters

Today, wireless technologies are increasingly deployed in industrial environments. Most available devices are plugged to a power source, but they achieve their real potential if they are used without any expensive cabling (e. g. for monitoring in remote locations). Furthermore, the question for an appropriate topology of the deployed network arises. Should the nodes directly transmit with higher power to the base station or instead use other nodes as relays, while transmitting at a lower power level? This can essentially impact the energy required for the data transmission. Especially if the wireless devices are battery driven, energy is a scarce resource in wireless sensor networks. In this paper the multi hop approach is compared to single hop according to energy consumption. Therefor, the network is parameterized with a local link rule in each sensor node, a global sensor density, the path loss and the size of the area with the deployed sensors. To model the radio wave propagation a varying path loss for the sensor connections is taken into account. Simulations reveal that only certain network and protocol configurations benefit from multi hop. Eventually, the results can be used to further parameterize the local link rule and to support the global selection of either multi hop or single hop in specific scenarios.