Parallel Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Networks

We study benefits of opportunistic routing in a large wireless ad hoc network by examining how the power, delay, and total throughput scale as the number of source-destination pairs increases up to the operating maximum. Our opportunistic routing is novel in a sense that it is massively parallel, i.e., it is performed by many nodes simultaneously to maximize the opportunistic gain while controlling the interuser interference. The scaling behavior of conventional multihop transmission that does not employ opportunistic routing is also examined for comparison. Our main results indicate that our opportunistic routing can exhibit a net improvement in overall power-delay tradeoff over the conventional routing by providing up to a logarithmic boost in the scaling law. Such a gain is possible since the receivers can tolerate more interference due to the increased received signal power provided by the multi user diversity gain, which means that having more simultaneous transmissions is possible.