On the optimal transmission distance for power-aware routing in Ad Hoc networks

Power-aware routing for battery-powered wireless ad hoc networks is crucial to insure the longevity of such networks. Most contemporary research that attempts to minimize the energy consumption does so via short distance transmissions. However, this transmission strategy leads to an increase in the number of network operations, and thus increases the probability of collision, which results in extra energy consumption for retransmissions. In this paper, we show that the minimum transmission distance does not result in the minimum energy consumption, and find the optimal transmission distance such that the energy consumption of the ad hoc network is minimal.