ESP-IDF Mesh - Does nodes use more battery based on their location?

[Doppler]

Hi all I am doing a small research, and I asked myself a question does one node in a small MESH network use more battery power based on its location inside the network?

So to prove this I utilize MAX17048 Battery Monitor, but I am not sure if I am on the correct path, so that's why I need better insight and clarification.

I scattered nodes throughout a 90m3 office space. Deployed this MESH example https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tr ... al_network and over MAX17048 gathered battery voltage and SOC percentage during one hour and sent data to time-based DB over MQTT.

I repeated this multiple times for different node locations. Every time my setup was like this:
- Battery: 100% charged on every measure start
- Code: same code deployed on all nodes
- Execution period: 1h
- MQTT sent: every minute

I can see voltage and SOC drop during the measured period on all nodes. I repeated this multiple times. Also, I placed nodes so that they form different layers but the final results on every node combination are almost the same.

My question is, can this be a valid measurement method? Can I improve it somehow to be able to measure this correctly?