Parallel Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates a novel massively parallel opportunistic routing scheme in large wireless ad hoc networks, demonstrating significant improvements in power-delay scaling by leveraging multi-user diversity and interference management.

Contribution

It introduces a new parallel opportunistic routing method that enhances scaling laws in wireless networks compared to traditional multi-hop routing.

Findings

Up to logarithmic improvement in power-delay scaling law.

Parallel opportunistic routing exploits multi-user diversity.

Enhanced interference tolerance enables more simultaneous transmissions.

Abstract

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