Impact of number of Hops and Paths on Wireless Sensor Network Performance

Abstract

In the last decade, there was rapid growing of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for research and commercial uses. Low-cost/low-power WSNs techniques are utilised in various applications such as smart-home, industrial control, health care, agricultural fields, environmental purposes, biomedical systems, and scientific applications. The aim of this research is to find the suitable number of paths and hops in each path to be used in transmit power control protocols for multi-path uniform density single-channel WSNs. This work aims to achieve two goals: (1) to reduce energy depletion and prolong the battery lifetime of sensor nodes by using transmit power control and, (2) to keep throughput and packet loss neutral by using multi-path routing. A limitation of most previous studies that aim to minimise transmit power is that they fail to take into consideration the throughput reduction. Through a number of case studies, it was determined that trying to reduce the power by using multi-hopping also results in the reduction of end-to-end throughput. Microsoft excel was used to calculate the mathematical equations results and draw graphs for the relations needed to be obtained. Given our assumptions, the result show that the optimal number of hops must be between two and six hops to save energy. This is mainly due to the overhead of each packet as the receive power of the sensor nodes. It was also determined that there is no need to have more than two paths between source and destination in order to achieve throughout neutrality.