A novel routing metric for multi-hop cooperative wireless networks

In cooperative wireless networks, the source node transmits the packets to its destination with the help from the cooperative nodes. However, existing routing metrics in the literature do not take into account the cooperative gain in choosing the next hop in a multi-hop network. In this paper, we propose a new routing metric that accounts for the potential cooperative gain a candidate next hop may receive from its neighbors. As such, a more efficient route selection can be done for better end-to-end performance. We call the proposed routing metric, Expected Transmission Time with Cooperation, and show that it outperforms hop count as a routing metric in terms of end-to-end transmission time (packet delay).