Multi-hop Geographic Transmission Scheme for the Uplink in Mesh Networks

We consider transmissions in the uplink of a wireless mesh network, in which a group of radios have information to transmit to a set of access points (APs). When the channels from the radios to the APs suffer from fading, conventional approaches, such as direct transmission to the AP or routing through pre-selected relays, may have a high probability of failure. In such channels, geographic transmission techniques may provide improved performance, as the relays are selected from those radios that successfully received the packet and that move it toward the AP. In our previous work, we developed Geographic Transmission with Optimized Relaying (GATOR), which provides an optimal relay selection technique for a system in which time is slotted and the AP can usually be reached in two hops. GATOR is shown to provide significantly better performance than direct transmission, routing, and other geographic transmission schemes. In this work, we generalize GATOR to scenarios in which the radios may be too far to reach the APs in two hops. We call this approach multi-hop GATOR, and show that it offers better performance than direct transmission, routing, or the original GATOR scheme.