Tradeoffs in the design of routing metrics for frequency-hop wireless networks

Throughput and energy consumption are two important performance measures for use in the evaluation of routing protocols for frequency-hop store-and-forward packet radio networks. As the radios adjust their transmission parameters to adapt to changes in propagation loss and interference, large differences may be created in the energy requirements of alternative routes available for routing. We previously demonstrated the advantages of incorporating an energy metric into least resistance routing to increase the energy efficiency of the routing protocol. In this paper new performance results are presented for an energy-efficient routing protocol, and the tradeoff between packet success probability and energy consumption is investigated.