CSCM: A Contention Sensitive Routing Metric for Efficient Cooperative Communication in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Cooperative communication allows several nodes to cooperatively transmit signals to a particular destination. Using cooperative communication, wireless networks could mitigate severe channel impairments arising from multipath propagation. In this case, the greater benefits are gained by exploiting spatial diversity in the channel. However, cooperative routing strategy in a network with multiple flows may cause collision among helping nodes and thus, reduce the overall system performance. Moreover, as the number of flows is increased, the probability of collisions also increases dramatically and performance tends to degrade. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol based on our proposed new routing metric called Contention Sensitive Cooperative Metric (CSCM), which takes contention relationship into consideration. Finally, the performance of the proposed routing protocol has been evaluated using simulation. The results demonstrate significant performance improvement of cooperative communication while using CSCM in terms of total network throughput and average end-to-end delay. Keywords— Cooperative Communication, Contention Sensitive Cooperative Routing, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output, Virtual Node, Virtual Link