Determination of the Optimal Hop Number for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is one of the primary challenges to the successful application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) since sensors can not be recharged easily once they are deployed. By carefully select the multi-hop number, energy consumption during routing process can be largely reduced and network lifetime can get prolonged. Although it is commonly agreed that multi-hop transmission is more energy efficient than direct transmission, especially when the source node is far away from sink node, how to determine the optimal hop number in both theoretical and practical network environment with constraint conditions is still a nontrivial problem. In this paper, we focus on theoretical deduction of the optimal hop number under one dimensional linear network environment. Then, we extend the deduced results to the practical sensor network. We also provide the selection of sub-optimal hop number under practical sensor network when the sensors are randomly deployed. The preliminary simulation results show that our optimal hop number based routing algorithm can save much more energy than many popular routing algorithms for WSNs.