Twelve reasons not to route over many short hops

For multihop wireless networks, a fundamental question is whether it is advantageous to route over many short hops (short-hop routing) or over a smaller number of longer hops (long-hop routing). Short-hop routing gained a lot of support, and its proponents mainly produce two arguments: reduced energy consumption and less interference. Both arguments stem from an oversimplified analysis, that is based on inaccurate channel models and neglects delay, end-to-end reliability, bias power consumption, the impact of channel coding, mobility, and routing overhead. In this paper, we shed more light on these issues by listing twelve reasons why short-hop routing is not as beneficial as it seems to be. The conclusion is that for many networks, long-hop routing is in every aspect a very competitive strategy.