A Multi-Criteria Receiver-Side Relay Election Approach in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Traditional purely greedy forwarding in wireless ad hoc networks is not optimal in most practical settings where perfect-reception-within-range cannot be assumed. Although a few link-aware routing schemes have been reported, the tradeoffs between greediness and link quality have not been studied. In this paper, we take a multi-criteria based receiver-side relay election approach in wireless multi-hop forwarding, where a single optimal node is elected among many candidates to relay packets toward the final destination. We introduce a general cost metric in the form of a multi-parameter mapping function, that aggregates all decision criteria into a single virtual criterion to rank potential relay candidates. We show that a suitable mapping function can be found, which trades off greediness for link quality to obtain optimal end-to-end network performance. Compared with the previously reported link-aware forwarding schemes, our results show a better energy performance and a substantial improvement in end-to-end delay