Cooperative Routing in Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Cooperative diversity has gained much interest due to its ability to mitigate multipath fading without using multiple antennas. There has been considerable research on how cooperative transmission can improve the performance of the physical layer. During the past few years, the researchers have started to take into consideration cooperative transmission in routing, and there has been a growing interest in designing and evaluating cooperative routing protocols. Routing algorithms that take into consideration the availability of cooperative transmission at the physical layer are known as cooperative routing algorithms. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing cooperative routing techniques, together with the highlights of the performance of each strategy. This survey also provides a taxonomy of different cooperative routing protocols and outlines the fundamental components and challenges associated with cooperative routing objectives. Existing cooperative routing algorithms are compared and lay the groundwork for further research.