Ad hoc enhanced routing in UMTS for increased packet delivery rates

Wireless communications is moving from cellular networks towards a more distributed, self-configuring ad hoc oriented networks. Until a complete metamorphosis occurs, the emerging techniques that allow communication by using no infrastructure at all can be enjoyed at the presence of the vast infrastructure of cellular systems. Alternatively, this situation can be viewed as the cellular systems of today benefiting from the flexible new techniques of ad hoc communications in order to improve current levels of performance. In this paper, we propose ad hoc routing techniques that allows improved packet delivery performance in the next generation of a UMTS system. Our results show that a hybrid network, where each mobile terminal is capable of communicating to a base station and to other mobile terminals in the network, and delivers packets much more successfully than the conventional UMTS network. Furthermore, the number of nodes that can be supported by such a system is much higher than the case of a pure cellular network. We construct 2 alternative routing schemes that exploit the hybrid architecture and show that performance is superior as compared to UMTS.