Design and Implementation of Interference-Aware Cooperative QoS Routing for Multi-hop Wireless Network

In this paper, we study how to use cooperative communication to provide QoS support for multi-hop wireless network. We define a new concept, called cooperative QoS routing which establishes a routing path and corresponding helpers to satisfy user's bandwidth requirement. We formulate an optimization problem, called Widest Cooperative Routing Path problem (WC-RP), which seeks a cooperative routing path P with maximum end-to-end bandwidth and a scheduling scheme for links in P to avoid interference. Main contribution of this paper is summarized as follow. We propose a distributed algorithm to solve WC-RP, which is implemented in the real test bed. We evaluate the performance of our distributed algorithm by experiments, and the result shows that our distributed algorithm can significantly improve the network performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on cooperative QoS routing for multi-hop wireless networks. Moreover, all existing works about cooperative routing is based on simulations while we implement our distributed algorithm in the real test bed.