Distributed power control and routing for clustered CDMA wireless ad hoc networks

We consider a multi-hop wireless ad hoc network where all nodes share a common channel, and code division multiple access (CDMA) is used to facilitate concurrent transmissions. The network model consists of groups of nodes that may loosely be termed as clusters. We address the question of how to efficiently facilitate intra- and inter-cluster communications between multiple source-destination pairs. The performance metric considered is throughput per unit power. The concurrent transmissions employ distributed power control and are scheduled to resolve conflicts. We propose a dynamic forwarding mechanism in which forwarding nodes are used when it is energy-efficient, and the choice of forwarding node varies according to source-destination pairs. We observe that such a dynamic forwarding policy yields improved throughput per unit power as compared to previously proposed schemes which use either fixed forwarding nodes or cluster-heads to perform inter-cluster communications.