Investigation of energy efficiency for singlehop and multihop routing shcemes in a wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor nodes run on small battery power and it is sometimes impossible to replace the batteries due to the environment and cost factors associated with them. Therefore, energy efficiency is a critical issue in the design and management of a wireless sensor network. In this paper, following the configuration and protocol implementation within a wireless sensor network, energy efficiencies for different routing schemes have been analysed based on the testing results on both energy consumption and data yield (throughput) for the whole network. The real world tests show that for a dense deployment multihop transmission is more energy efficient compared to singlehop transmission, while the opposite may be true when the sensors are deployed sparsely.