Interference-aware cooperative routing in wireless networks

We study interference-aware, many-to-many cooperative routing algorithms in wireless networks. Network performance is measured in terms of effective rate achieved when multiple frames are transmitted sequentially over a single cooperative path. Motivated by the overall network performance when multiple concurrent sessions are taken into consideration, we develop heuristic algorithms that reduce the interference caused by a session to a small geographic neighborhood. This allows the following frames and possibly the rest of the network to operate efficiently. We introduce an interference-aware performance metric based on the effective rate and evaluate the performance of several cooperative routing algorithms. Our heuristic algorithms show an improvement of 10-20% in the effective rate over traditional cooperative routing algorithms and an improvement of 10% over simple routing without cooperative transmission. We show that cooperation has little if any performance gain over simple relaying in terms of effective rate when inter-frame interference is not taken into consideration.