Cooperative Protocols Design for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks with Multi-hop Routing

Wireless ad-hoc networks can experience significant performance degradation under fading channels. Spatial diversity has been shown to be an effective way of combating wireless fading with the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique by transmitting correlated information through multiple antennas. The virtual MIMO technique, which allows multiple wireless stations with single antenna to form a virtual transmission array, is shown to be a viable solution from several recent studies. In this paper, we propose a complete system framework for wireless ad-hoc networks utilizing two different cooperative relaying techniques at the physical layer: the repetition coding and the space-time coding. In the data link layer, two medium access control protocols are proposed to accommodate the corresponding physical layer cooperative diversity schemes. In the network layer, diversity-aware routing protocols are proposed to determine the routing path and the relaying topology. Simulations with both constant bit rate and TCP (transmission control protocol) traffic show significant performance gains of the proposed cooperative relaying schemes.