An Energy-efficient Metric for Relay Selection in Large-Scale Multi-hop Wireless Networks

This paper considers a large-scale multi-hop wireless networks where the nodes are distributed randomly with high density in a 2-Dimension plane and the source node transmits the packets to the remote destination in a multi-hop way. Thus, relay selection becomes the key technology during the routing. Accordingly, a new energy-effective metric is proposed for the relay selection in the large-scale multi-hop networks. During the routing, the forwarding area is predefined dynamically, in which the relay is selected opportunistically according to the metric. Meanwhile, to fully evaluate the system performance, the node circuit energy consumption is also taken into consideration. Under our metric, the average forwarding distance per unit energy consumption of each hop is maximized by selecting the optimal parameters of predefined forwarding area. In this way, the number of nodes that participated into the routing are optimized for the purpose of energy saving.