Correlation of Wireless Link Quality: A Distributed Approach for Computing the Reception Correlation

The adaptive estimation of packet reception correlation on different wireless links might provide a performance indicator for opportunistic and network coding protocols, leading to the design of novel routing schemes. This paper presents an on-line algorithm to compute the packet reception correlation in a fully distributed fashion. We exploit our algorithm to compute adaptively the κ factor, a new metric proposed recently to capture this correlation on different links. The results obtained on real-life network scenarios show that it accurately estimates the reception correlation of wireless links.