Analysis of energy efficiency for Wi-Fi 802.11b multi-hop networks

Wireless local area network (WLAN) is growing popularly day by day. A common WLAN application is Wi-Fi technology, where it is easy to find in public areas and has a great interest of internet access users, particularly those who use mobile devices (nodes) such as notebooks and mobile phones. The phenomenon has impact on the energy consumption in Wi-Fi networks. Nowadays, the consumption, management and energy efficiency of indoor wireless networks are important issues. Therefore, this paper analyses the energy efficiency for Wi-Fi 802.11b multi-hop networks. The Wifi 802.11b multi-hop network is simulated using Network Simulator 3 (NS-3), in which the network consists of a line sequence of 5 wireless nodes that are a source, three relays and a destination. In the simulation, several energy parameters are considered such as the number of nodes, grid spacing, packet size and data rate. Moreover, several important energy efficiency factors are analyzed including energy consumption, effective energy utilization, bit energy, throughput and energy efficiency. The simulation results show that the number of the packet size and throughput have impact on energy consumption and energy efficiency in the network. While effective energy utilization decreases as the throughput of the network increases. Therefore, the Wi-Fi 802.11b multi-hop network can be an alternative green communication method which has a higher energy efficiency.