A new communication scheme for MANETs

The communication protocols used in wireless ad hoc networks today have been designed to support reliable communication between senders and receivers that compete with other sender-receiver sets for the use of the shared bandwidth. This competition-driven approach prevents wireless ad hoc networks from scaling with the number of nodes. We introduce a collaboration-driven approach to the sharing of the available bandwidth in wireless ad hoc networks, which we call opportunistic cooperation. This scheme is based on the integration of multiuser detection and position-location information with frequency and code division in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Transmissions are divided in frequency and codes according to nodal locations, and successive interference cancellation (SIC) is used at receivers to allow them to decode and use all transmissions from strong interfering sources. We show that both the link's Shannon capacity and the per source-destination throughput scale like O(n/sup /spl alpha//2/) (upper-bound) and /spl Omega/[f(n)] (lower-bound), for n nodes in the network, a path loss parameter /spl alpha/ > 2, and 1 /spl les/ f(n) < n/sup /spl alpha//2/.