Parallel Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Networks

Abstract: We study benefits of opportunistic routing in a large wireless ad hoc network by examining how the power, delay, and total throughput scale as the number of source- destination pairs increases up to the operating maximum. Our opportunistic routing is novel in a sense that it is massively parallel, i.e., it is performed by many nodes simultaneously to maximize the opportunistic gain while controlling the inter-user interference. The scaling behavior of conventional multi-hop transmission that does not employ opportunistic routing is also examined for comparison. Our results indicate that our opportunistic routing can exhibit a net improvement in overall power--delay trade-off over the conventional routing by providing up to a logarithmic boost in the scaling law. Such a gain is possible since the receivers can tolerate more interference due to the increased received signal power provided by the multi-user diversity gain, which means that having more simultaneous transmissions is possible.