Multihop Diversity for Fading Mitigation in Multihop Wireless Networks

The concept of multihop diversity is proposed, where all the nodes of a multihop link are assumed to have buffers for temporarily storing their received packets. During each time-slot, the best hop having, for example, the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), is selected from the set of those hops that have packets awaiting transmission in the buffer. The packet is then transmitted over the best hop. This hop-selection procedure yields selection diversity, but it requires the global channel knowledge of the hops' channel quality. In this paper, we assume having perfect channel knowledge and focus our attention on the principles and performance bounds of the error probability and outage probability. Our studies show that relying on multiple hops has the potential of providing a significant diversity gain, which may be exploited for enhancing the reliability of wireless multihop communications.