Maximizing Transmission Opportunities in Wireless Multihop Networks

Being readily available in most of 802.11 radios, multirate capability appears to be useful as WiFi networks are getting more prevalent and crowded. More specifically, it would be helpful in high-density scenarios because internode distance is short enough to employ high data rates. However, communication at high data rates mandates a large number of hops for a given node pair in a multihop network and thus, can easily be depreciated as per-hop overhead at several layers of network protocol is aggregated over the increased number of hops. This paper presents a novel multihop, multirate adaptation mechanism, called multihop transmission opportunity (MTOP), that allows a frame to be forwarded a number of hops consecutively to minimize the MAC-layer overhead between hops. This seemingly collision-prone nonstop forwarding is proved to be safe via analysis and USRP/GNU Radio-based experiment in this paper. The idea of MTOP is in clear contrast to the conventional opportunistic transmission mechanism, known as TXOP, where a node transmits multiple frames back-to-back when it gets an opportunity in a single-hop WLAN. We conducted an extensive simulation study via OPNET, demonstrating the performance advantage of MTOP under a wide range of network scenarios.