There has been an upsurge of interest in multi-hop infrastructure-based wireless networks in the past recent years. The fundamental reason being that multi-hop communication provides benefits such as coverage extensions, combating of shadowing at high radio frequencies and reduced infrastructure deployment costs. For IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) to utilize multi-hop communication efficiently, power consumption or energy consumption need to be effectively minimized. The basic approach to reduce power consumption is to lower the transmit power to the optimum level that still achieves correct reception of a packet. Adopting this minimization approach, this paper presents a power efficient multi-hop communication algorithm for IEEE 802.11. The proposed scheme estimates the number of nodes, transmit power level and the separation distance of nodes based on transmission distance, system throughput, energy consumption and cost, transmitter costs and operation period, and network percentage of use. Simulation results show that our method significantly reduces power consumption as compared to conventional multi-hop communication.