Have your cake and eat it too!: enabling frequency diversity through opportunism

Abstract

The broadcast nature of wireless networks is both a boon and a bane. On the one hand, multiple receivers may overhear a single transmission on the same channel at no additional cost above a point-to-point transmission; this property has been exploited in many opportunistic applications (e.g., [2]). On the other hand, the shared nature of the medium effectively forces wireless nodes to leverage frequency diversity and channelization for efficiency. Unfortunately, coordinating communication between nodes that may switch channels at any time is difficult and may in fact offset any performance gains from leveraging frequency diversity.