Location assisted routing for near-far effect mitigation in wireless networks

CDMA technology represents an attractive choice for various wireless ad hoc networks applications, due to its appealing properties, such as resistance to jamming and interference, low probability of intercept, and potential for energy savings. On the other hand, ad hoc CDMA network performance is severely limited by strong interferers, and for peer-to-peer communications the near-far effect problem cannot be mitigated through power control as in cellular systems. In this paper, we propose a location assisted routing solution to alleviate the near-far problem at the network level. The novelty of the solution resides in using a composite cost function for route optimization, which accounts for an estimate of the near-far effect generated by each relaying node. This estimate is determined based on node locations information. The tradeoff performance-complexity is investigated, and we show that a throughput improvement of up to 45% can be obtained using the new proposed near-far effect aware routing metric