A crosslayer design approach for multihop diversity schemes with feedback capabilities

Abstract

Motivated by the recent works on multihop diversity, this paper presents a crosslayer approach to design a multihop transmission protocol for wireless adhoc networks. We consider a transmission protocol for a multihop wireless network that does not restrict its transmission range within one hop. In the crosslayer design approach, we adopt diversity gain in the physical layer, automatic request for retransmission (ARQ) in the data-link layer and optimal number of hops in the network layer. We focus on the optimal transmission-rate and minimum number of hops of a linear multihop network. An optimal automatic request for cooperation (ARC) based multihop protocol is proposed to maximize the end-to-end throughput and minimize the number of retransmission. In this optimal protocol, all succeeding relays of a transmitting terminal require to receive the packet and send feedback. Although it gives the optimal performance, the implementation complexity of such protocol is very high. To achieve a good complexity-performance tradeoff, a K-hop ARC based multihop protocol is further proposed, where only the K succeeding relay nodes receive the transmitted packet and send feedback. Simulation results are provided to show that the proposed protocols outperform the conventional multihop protocol and the multihop diversity protocol in terms of end-to-end throughput.