On accurate energy consumption models for wireless ad hoc networks

Energy conservation is important for ad hoc networks. However, little effort has been made to carefully study the energy cost metrics upon which the design of various energy efficient algorithms is based. More specifically, most existing energy consumption models only considered energy cost of ex-changing data packets, although common wireless protocols also need control packets (e.g., ACK) for reliable data transmissions. Without considering the energy cost of exchanging control packets, these existing models tend to underestimate the actual energy consumption, and thus leading to suboptimal energy efficient designs. In this paper, we develop energy consumption models that take into account energy consumption due to data packets, control packets and retransmission. We verify by simulations that our models match the actual energy consumption much better than existing models. In addition, we show that a minimum energy routing protocol based on an accurate model of ours performs much better than those based on existing models.