Analysis of hopping strategies in multi-hop wireless networks

In this paper, the effects of different hopping strategies onto the performance of multi-hop wireless networks are analyzed. Employing the multi-hop aggregate information efficiency (MIE_A), a simple metric able to capture several peculiarities of multi-hop networks, three policies of the relay selection (closest neighbor, most distant neighbor and random neighbor) are studied. The results show that 16-QAM with a single possibility of packet retransmission leads to the highest MIE_A, regardless the hopping strategy. The analysis also reveals that the required power that optimizes the MIE_A and the maximum MIE_A have approximately the same value for the different hopping policies. However, in more realistic networks, where it is not possible to adjust the minimum power with the node density variation, the results suggest that the most suitable hopping strategy is to select the closest neighbor as the relay node, although the number of hops between source and destination tends to increase. Moreover, the results of this comparison reinforce the potential of location-awareness in the optimization of ad hoc networks.