EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 53075, 7 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/53075
Research Article
Capacity of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Opportunistic Collaborative Communications
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, Milano 20133, Italy
Received 17 January 2006; Revised 13 November 2006; Accepted 27 December 2006
Academic Editor: Christian Hartmann
Copyright © 2007 O. Simeone and U. Spagnolini. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Optimal multihop routing in ad hoc networks requires the exchange of
control messages at the MAC and network layer in order to set up the
(centralized) optimization problem. Distributed opportunistic space-time
collaboration (OST) is a valid alternative that avoids this drawback by
enabling opportunistic cooperation with the source at the physical layer.
In this paper, the performance of OST is investigated. It is shown
analytically that opportunistic collaboration outperforms (centralized)
optimal multihop in case spatial reuse (i.e., the simultaneous transmission
of more than one data stream) is not allowed by the transmission protocol.
Conversely, in case spatial reuse is possible, the relative performance
between the two protocols has to be studied case by case in terms of the
corresponding capacity regions, given the topology and the physical
parameters of network at hand. Simulation results confirm that opportunistic
collaborative communication is a promising paradigm for wireless ad hoc
networks that deserves further investigation.