Energy efficiency of many-to-one communications in wireless networks

This paper analyzes the energy consumption in a wireless network where communication occurs in a many-to-one fashion. The main motivation for this work comes from a large class of data-gathering wireless sensor networks. We consider and compare both flat and clustering network structures. We derive the ideal or minimum energy consumption required in both cases. We examine how the energy consumption is affected by the range of transmission of the nodes and the size of the area where the network is deployed. We also examine how the number of clusters affects energy consumption.