Understanding the Benefits of Opportunism and Cooperation in Multihop Wireless Networks

Opportunism and cooperation have emerged as powerful techniques for increasing throughput in a wireless network by exploiting the broadcast nature of the medium. In this paper we use simple Markov Chain models, augmented by simulation, to investigate the benefits of using opportunism and cooperation rather than traditional hop-by-hop, fixed-path routing in a multi-hop wireless mesh network. We consider several different topologies, including a linear network and a diamond network with a group of relays between source and destination. In the latter case, we consider both a single source-destination pair, as well as two competing source-destination pairs. We quantify the throughput gains and observe that both opportunism and cooperation can provide a significant improvement in throughput over the hop-by-hop case for these simple topologies.