CAREER: Opportunistic Routing in Multihop and Multirate Wireless Networks

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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.