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

Wireless ad-hoc networks can experience significant performance degradation under fading channels. Diversity through space 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 results show significant performance gains of the proposed cooperative relaying schemes.