Open Access Research Article

Hop-Distance Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks with Applications to Resources Allocation

Liang Zhao* and Qilian Liang

Author Affiliations

Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76010, USA

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EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2007, 2007:084256 doi:10.1155/2007/84256


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/084256


Received:22 May 2006
Revisions received:7 December 2006
Accepted:26 April 2007
Published:19 June 2007

© 2007 Zhao and Liang

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We address a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks, how many hops does it take a packet to be relayed for a given distance? For a deterministic topology, this hop-distance estimation reduces to a simple geometry problem. However, a statistical study is needed for randomly deployed WSNs. We propose a maximum-likelihood decision based on the conditional pdf of . Due to the computational complexity of , we also propose an attenuated Gaussian approximation for the conditional pdf. We show that the approximation visibly simplifies the decision process and the error analysis. The latency and energy consumption estimation are also included as application examples. Simulations show that our approximation model can predict the latency and energy consumption with less than half RMSE, compared to the linear models.

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