Interference analysis of multi-hop cellular sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks can enhance efficiency in a wide range of settings, from health care to the electric grid. Identifying high-capacity architectures for wireless sensor networks is critical to supporting many of the applications that are envisioned to modernize these sectors. In this paper, we propose a multi-hop architecture with in-band relaying to improve the capacity of cellular sensor networks. We present an interference analysis for our multi-hop network and compare the uplink outage capacity for different number of hops. We show that, with spread spectrum based transmissions, multi-hop communication can significantly increase capacity relative to the conventional single-hop model, however the capacity improvement diminishes as the number of hops increases.