Performance Evaluation of Parallel Opportunistic Multihop Routing

Opportunistic routing was originally introduced in various multihop network environments to reduce the number of hops in such a way that, among the relays that decode the transmitted packet for the current hop, the one that is closest to the destination becomes the transmitter for the next hop. Unlike the conventional opportunistic routing case where there is a single active S-D pair, for an ad hoc network in the presence of fading, we investigate the performance of parallel opportunistic multihop routing that is simultaneously performed by many source-destination (S-D) pairs to maximize the opportunistic gain, thereby enabling us to obtain a logarithmic gain. We first analyze a cut-set upper bound on the throughput scaling law of the network. Second, computer simulations are performed to verify the performance of the existing opportunistic routing for finite network conditions and to show trends consistent with the analytical predictions in the scaling law. More specifically, we evaluate both power and delay with respect to the number of active S-D pairs and then, numerically show a net improvement in terms of the power-delay trade-off over the conventional multihop routing that does not consider the randomness of fading.