An Opportunistic Routing Protocol Design for Wireless Networks: A Physical Layer Perspective

Ad hoc networking research has received considerable attention in recent years as it represents the next phase of networking evolution. Efficient and reliable routing of data from the source to destination with minimal power consumption remains the crux of the research problem. Fading mechanisms inherent in wireless communications can impact the packet routing mechanisms in these types of networks. In this thesis, we develop a mathematical framework for evaluating several network diversity schemes that take advantage of the random nature of fading to provide/ enhance the network performance. The efficacy of these different network diversity mechanisms are examined in slow-fading, frequency non-selective Rice and Nakagami-m multipath fading channels. Performance metrics such as the end-to-end outage probability and the end-to-end average symbol error rate are studied in the analysis of these types of networks with the proposed network diversity schemes. Numerical results reveal that the proposed schemes can offer significant power efficiency improvement in a variety of operating scenarios of practical interest.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Aduwo, Akinyemi Tolulope

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Annamalai, Annamalai Jr.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Buehrer, R. Michael
• Tranter, William H.

• fading mechanisms
• Ad hoc networks
• network diversity

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-02162004-175740

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/9721