CAREER: Opportunistic Routing in Multihop and Multirate Wireless Networks

翻译后摘要：启发式路由（OR）是一个功能强大的新概念，利用广播性质的无线介质和网络拓扑结构的空间多样性，以科普随时间变化的无线链路在多跳无线网络。它的潜力，以提高网络性能，如网络容量，还没有得到很好的理解，也缺乏有效的和分布式的路由协议，充分利用其优势，实现性能最优的端到端的路径级别。本项目主要研究多跳无线网络中的OR理论和协议设计。研究结果还将扩展到其他新兴的无线技术，如多速率，多信道等，有两个主要的推力在这个项目。第一个推力集中在理论研究的网络容量和性能界限可实现的OR。本文将建立一个新的理论框架来描述无线干扰、多速率能力、时变信道衰落及其对OR性能的影响。将设计一种方法来计算给定OR网络中源和目的地对之间的吞吐量界限。第二个重点是开发分布式和高效的通信协议。现有的OR方案主要集中在链路层的协调机制，在这个项目中的路由协议设计的重点是在更大范围内的空间多样性的开发路径级和目标的端到端的性能最优。这项研究将推进理论前沿在多跳无线网络中的OR的基本限制的特征，并将提供一个更好的理解，在这样的网络中的有效的OR协议设计的理论指导方针。

Abstract:Opportunistic routing (OR) is a powerful new concept that exploits broadcast nature of wireless medium and spatial diversity of network topology to cope with time-varying wireless links in multihop wireless networks. Its potential to improve the network performance, such as network capacity, has not been well understood and there is also a lack of efficient and distributed routing protocols that fully exploit its advantage to achieve performance optimality at the end-to-end path level. This project focuses on the theory and protocol design of OR in multihop wireless networks. The results will also be extended to incorporate other emerging wireless technologies, such as multi-rate, multi-channel, etc. There are two main thrusts in this project. The first thrust focuses on a theoretic study on the network capacity and performance bounds achievable by OR. A novel theoretical framework will be established to characterize the wireless interference, multirate capability, time-varying channel fading, and their impact on the performance of OR. A method to compute the throughput bounds between a source and destination pair in a given OR network will be devised. The second thrust is to develop distributed and efficient communication protocols. While existing OR schemes mainly focus on the link layer coordination mechanisms, the emphasis of routing protocol design in this project is on the exploit of the spatial diversity in a larger scale at path level and target to end-to-end performance optimality. This research will advance the theoretical frontier in characterizing fundamental limits of OR in multihop wireless networks and will provide a better understanding of theoretical guidelines to the efficient OR protocol design in such networks.