An experimental study of fractional cooperation in wireless mesh networks

Fractional cooperation is a decentralized, low-complexity wireless networking protocol in which nodes have the ability to dynamically select a fraction of its resources to commit to forwarding, and where sources may use more than one relay to convey information to the destination. In this paper, an implementation and a series of experiments are presented to demonstrate the practical performance and effectiveness of fractional cooperation. A low-complexity MAC layer protocol is used, which employs fractional cooperation using LT codes in the absence of central coordination. Experimental results from real-world trials are given, which show that this protocol can maintain a reasonable throughput when nodes are abruptly entering and leaving, making it ideal for a dynamically changing system, such as an ad-hoc network. The redundancy of information seen in the network makes this scheme robust to unfavourable channel conditions.