A Novel Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Cooperative communication (CC) is a technique that exploits spatial diversity allowing multiple nodes to cooperatively relay signals to the receiver so that it can combine the received signals to obtain the original message. CC can be combined with topology control to increase connectivity at the cost of a small increase in energy consumption. This work focuses on exploring CC to improve the connectivity with a sink node in ad hoc wireless networks. More precisely, this work proposes a new technique, named CoopSink, that combines CC and topology control techniques to increase connectivity to a sink node while ensuring energyefficient routes. Simulation results show that connectivity and routing to the sink cost can be improved up to 6.8 and 2.3 times, respectively, when compared with other similar strategies. The first algorithm uses a distributed decision process at each node that makes use of only 2-hop neighborhood information. The second algorithm sets up the transmission ranges of nodes iteratively, over a maximum of six steps, using only 1-hop neighborhood information. We analyze the performance of our approaches through extensive simulation.