Performance Study of Cooperative Routing Metric for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Cooperative communication enables the nodes in wireless networks to transmit their packets to the next hops with the help of neighboring nodes. The design of cooperative MAC usually considers only the communication within one hop and current routing protocols have seldom been developed with the concept of cooperative communications. Envisaging the new challenge in cooperative wireless networks, we have proposed a routing metric based on average transmission time with the opportunistic cooperation to determine the optimum route and select the best next hop, with a MAC layer based on cooperative 802.11 MAC. In this paper, we adapt and implement cooperative 802.11 MAC and AODV to accommodate the design of this proposed routing metric on QualNet platform. We compare the results through the simulation to confirm that the performance gain of our proposed metric over minimum hop count in terms of average end-to-end delay and throughput experienced by the data flows is achievable.