Achievable Performance Improvements Provided by Route Diversity in Multihop Wireless Networks

When considering many paths in a multihop wireless setting, the variability of channels results in some paths providing better performance than other paths, i.e., path diversity. While it is well known that some paths are better than others, a significant number of routing protocols do not focus on selecting the optimal path. However, cooperative diversity, an area of recent interest, provides techniques to exploit path and channel diversity. Here we examine the potential performance improvement when optimal paths are used. Three settings are examined, where the path loss can be neglected, where path loss is considered, but channel correlation is not accounted for, and where path loss and channel correlation are accounted for. It is shown that path diversity can lead to dramatic improvements in performance. For This work was prepared through collaborative participation in the Collaborative Technology Alliance for Communications and Networks sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement DAAD1901-2-0011. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon.