Energy consumption is a key concern of designers of multi-hop wireless network. If the large variety of routing protocol (geographical, gradient, reactif, ...) proposed in the literature provides a set of pertinent solutions, it does not permit to know the conditions of use of these protocols based on parameters such as : the dynamics of topology, traffic pattern, the density and diameter of the network, the load, etc. In this paper, we present a theoretical model for evaluating the energy consumption for communication protocols taking into account both the dynamics of nodes and links, the properties of topology, the traffic pattern, the control/data packets and a realistic channel model. This model is applied successively to several protocols (GPSR, AODV, OLSR and PF) to highlight their optimum usage and it permit to conclude that Beacon-Less routing protocol are adapted for application with low traffic.