Evaluating forwarding schemes exploiting path diversity and degrees of redundancy in a realistic wireless environment

In this paper we validate and extend through simulations the trends revealed by the analytical results of our prior work concerning the throughput-delay trade-off that can be achieved by forwarding schemes exploiting path diversity and different degrees of redundancy focusing on the case of hop-by-hop retransmissions at the link-layer. The simulation environment is based on 802.11 Physical and Mac layer. It employs single source unicast traffic and consists of two scenarios with high and low interference respectively. A key contribution of this study is the demonstration of the throughput-delay trade-off for various forwarding schemes, including network-coding based ones, under a more realistic wireless model where link loss rates are determined dynamically by the SINR criterion.