Joint effect of data rate and routing strategy on energy-efficiency of IEEE 802.11 DCF based multi-hop wireless networks under hidden terminal existence

We investigate the joint effect of data rate and routing strategy on energy-efficiency of multi-hop wireless networks incorporating a comprehensive behavior of the IEEE 802.11 DCF under the presence of hidden terminals. Two basic routing strategies, direct transmission versus multi-hop routing, are considered over a large range of traffic loads. The goal of this study is to layout guidelines for a cross-layer energy-efficient rate adaptation algorithm, which takes medium access control and network layer dynamics into account together with the hidden terminal effect.Our results show that, for the low-power wireless IEEE 802.11g standard considered in this article, the highest data rate consumes the least power in multi-hop wireless networks when hidden terminals mostly constitute the reason of collisions. In case of channel impairments, adapting the rate jointly with the routing strategy can save the energy consumed per bit by up to 250%250% under moderate traffic loads and much more under heavy traffic loads.