Making ad hoc networks scale using mobility and multi-copy forwarding

Multiuser diversity has been shown to increase the throughput of mobile ad hoc wireless networks (MANET) when compared to fixed networks. We present a different multiuser diversity strategy for packet relaying, which permits more than one-copy (multi-copies) of a packet to be received by relay nodes, thus allowing us to decrease the delay on such networks for a fixed number of total users n. We show that the /spl theta/(1) throughput is preserved by our multi-copy technique when n goes to infinity. In addition, we find that the average delay and variance scale like /spl theta/(n) and /spl theta/(n/sup 2/) respectively for both one-copy and multi-copies techniques. We also show that for a fixed n and by multi-copy forwarding, a maximum bounded delay value can he guaranteed.