Parallel Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Networks

Abstract

We study benefits of opportunistic routing in a large wireless ad hoc network\nby examining how the power, delay, and total throughput scale as the number of\nsource- destination pairs increases up to the operating maximum. Our\nopportunistic routing is novel in a sense that it is massively parallel, i.e.,\nit is performed by many nodes simultaneously to maximize the opportunistic gain\nwhile controlling the inter-user interference. The scaling behavior of\nconventional multi-hop transmission that does not employ opportunistic routing\nis also examined for comparison. Our results indicate that our opportunistic\nrouting can exhibit a net improvement in overall power--delay trade-off over\nthe conventional routing by providing up to a logarithmic boost in the scaling\nlaw. Such a gain is possible since the receivers can tolerate more interference\ndue to the increased received signal power provided by the multi-user diversity\ngain, which means that having more simultaneous transmissions is possible.\n