Cooperative routing in multi-source multi-destination multi-hop wireless networks

In a network supporting cooperative communication, the sender of a transmission is no longer a single node, which causes the concept of a traditional link to be reinvestigated. Thus, the routing scheme basing on the link concept should also be reconsidered to "truly" exploit the potential performance gain introduced by cooperative communication. In this paper, we investigate the joint problem of routing selection in network layer and contention avoidance among multiple links in MAC layer for multi-hop wireless networks in a cooperative communication aware network. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to investigate the problem of cooperative communication aware routing in multi-source multi-destination multi-hop wireless networks. Several important concepts, including virtual node, virtual link and virtual link based contention graph are introduced. Basing on those concepts, an optimal cooperative routing is achieved and a distributed routing scheme is proposed after some practical approximations. The simulation results show that our scheme reduces the total transmission power comparing with non-cooperative routing and greatly increases the network throughput comparing with single flow cooperative routings.