Contention for opportunistic relay selection in mobile ad hoc networks

Contention based relay selection has been widely employed and currently plays an important role in wireless ad hoc networks. According to how much a node can expedite the relay of a packet toward its destination, each node has a different priority, and the contention window of the node is set inversely proportional to this priority. In this paper, we derive an optimal value for the maximum contention window size required to achieve both a high successful selection probability and a low relay delay for mobile ad hoc networks. The results show that we can achieve a successful selection probability with a low constant delay regardless of the number of competing candidate nodes by using the optimal maximum contention window size.