  We study outage regions for energy-constrained multi-hop and adaptive
multi-route networks with an arbitrary number of relay nodes. Optimal power
allocation strategies in the sense that outage probability is minimized are
derived depending on the distances between the transmit nodes. We further
investigate the rate gain of adaptive multi-route and multi-hop over direct
transmission. It is shown that a combined strategy of direct transmission and
adaptive multi-route outperforms multi-hop for all values of rate R. It can be
stated that cooperation strategies are beneficial for low-rate systems where
the main goal is a very low outage probability of the network. As the rate is
increased, direct transmission becomes more and more attractive.
