Energy efficiency of multi-hop communication in wireless sensor network

Multi-hop communication will become an important technology to reduce energy consumption and prolong network lifetime in wireless sensor network(WSN). One of the major causes for energy consumption is the radio transmission energy, which is proportional to the 2nd or 4th power of the transmission distance in general. Communication between two nodes can be further broadened to multi-hop communications in which a node may help other nodes communicate with each other. In this paper, we research a scenario of multi-hop communication where one node may help other node to transmit data. We derive the average energy efficiency under Rayleigh fading channels, and compare with single-hop communication.