The stability of multihop transport with autonomous cooperation

Cooperative communications is a critical component of a number of emerging mobile ad hoc network (MANET) architectures including opportunistic large arrays (OLAs), barrage relay networks (BRNs), and the path access control (PAC) protocols described by Ramanathan and Yackoski, et al. BRNs in particular employ an autonomous decode-and-forward cooperation scheme that is being used operationally at the tactical edge. This paper studies the stability of multihop routes in MANETs employing such autonomous cooperative communications at the physical layer. Specifically, a combination of analysis and simulation is used to quantify end-to-end availability probability under a variant of the random direction mobility model. Much as an understanding of unicast route lifetimes is important to reactive routing protocol design in traditional architectures, the expected lifetime of cooperative multihop routes informs the design of multihop access control protocols in OLAs and BRNs.