Cooperation-Augmented Routing

We explore the possibility of implementing cooperative relaying in extended multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks. Traditionally, the communication between far away node pairs in large networks is achieved by routing. A route is established between the source node and an intended destination node and the message is sent along this route, one hop at a time. However, the wireless channels between node pairs suffer from the small-scale fading and any degradation in the channel qualities along the route results in the loss of the message or requires establishing a new route. Much recent work on wireless network research focused on cooperative relaying to overcome the effects of small-scale fading. In this work, we propose cooperation-augmented routing which exploits cooperative relaying on top of an routing protocol.