Cooperative and opportunistic transmission for wireless ad hoc networks

Moving toward 4G, wireless ad hoc networks receive growing interest due to users' provisioning of mobility, usability of services, and seamless communications. In ad hoc networks fading environments provide the opportunity to exploit variations in channel conditions, and transmit to the user with the currently "best" channel. In this article two types of opportunistic transmission, which leverage time diversity and multi-user diversity, respectively, are studied. Considering the co-channel interference and lack of a central controller in ad hoc networks, the "cooperative and opportunistic transmission" concept is promoted. For opportunistic transmission that exploits time diversity, it is observed that the inequality in channel contention due to the hidden terminal phenomenon tends to result in energy inefficiency. Under this design philosophy, we propose a distributed cooperative rate adaptation (CRA) scheme to reduce overall system power consumption. Taking advantage of the time-varying channel among different users/receivers and being aware of the potential contention among neighboring transmissions, we propose a QoS-aware cooperative and opportunistic scheduling (COS) scheme to improve system performance while satisfying QoS requirements of individual flows. Simulation results show that by leveraging node cooperation, our proposed schemes, CRA and COS, achieve higher network throughput and provide better QoS support than existing work