Energy Efficient Routing in Ad Hoc Networks with Nakagami-m Fading Channels

This paper considers minimum-energy routing problem in Poisson random ad-hoc networks with Nakagami-m fading channels. We first formulate an analytical model for the transmission power, subject to a certain packet reception probability, under the assumption that the users employ proper power control and slotted ALOHA protocol. Based on this, we consider five routing strategies and compare their energy performances. Our results show that, long-hop routing in Nakagami-m networks can be more energy efficient than short-hop routing in certain scenarios, especially under light traffic and significant channel fading. When the interference can not be neglected, short-hop routing is typically better. It is also observed that when the path loss exponent is small, intelligent MAC mechanisms are critical for the energy efficiencies of routing strategies.