Analysis of intra-flow interference in Opportunistic Large Array transmission for strip networks

The Opportunistic Large Array (OLA), a simple form of concurrent cooperative transmission that extends range, is known to provide fast and reliable broadcasting of a single packet on both disk- and strip-shaped networks. This paper studies multi-packet OLA transmission within a single flow along a strip-shaped network, which also models an OLA-based cooperative route in a large multi-hop network. One packet makes interference on many other packets in the same flow, which generally retards OLA sizes for all packets, and can cause some packets to die off. However, by using the continuum and deterministic channel assumptions, which correspond to high node density, the authors show that multi-packet transmission can be made reliable and throughput can be optimized, by selecting the correct inter-packet spacing.