On Reliable Routing in Wireless Networks with Diversity

Many forms of diversity have been exploited in communication systems to combat fading nature of wireless channels. Some examples are time diversity, frequency diversity, space diversity and multiuser diversity. However, another form of diversity inherent in any wireless network, which is usually not exploited, is the diversity due to the shared medium of propagation. When in a network one node transmits to the other node, all the other nodes may hear this transmission and some of them can decode the data as well. This data can be used later to enhance the end-to-end network reliability. Previous works mostly consider some special cases of relay nodes configurations, not the general case. In this paper we formalize the general diversity problem and propose a heuristic algorithm for solving the routing problem. We also compare routing in networks where diversity is present with networks without diversity by simulations and see how diversity enhances the network end-to-end reliability. This method is suitable for single purpose networks which need high end-to-end reliability, and we provide this reliability by diversity.