Cooperative Routing in Wireless Networks

The joint problem of transmission-side diversity and routing in wireless networks is studied. It is assumed that each node in the network is equipped with a single omni-directional antenna and multiple nodes are allowed to coordinate their transmissions to achieve transmission-side diversity. The problem of finding the minimum energy route under this setting is formulated. Analytical asymptotic results are obtained for lower bounds on the resulting energy savings for both a regular line network topology and a grid network topology. For a regular line topology, it is possible to achieve energy savings of 39%. For a grid topology, it is possible to achieve energy savings of 56%. For arbitrary networks, we develop heuristics with polynomial complexity which result in average energy savings of 30% − 50% on simulations.