A study of opportunistic relaying MAC protocol

Recent studies have shown a considerable interest in the development of Medium Access and Control (MAC) protocols for multi-rate wireless networks. The approach of sending the packet to the farthest possible node along the route does not maximize the performance unlike in the case of single-rate wireless networks. The scheme of sending the packet always to the neighbor with best channel quality also does not give the best network throughput. This thesis proposes to exploit the diversity in channel qualities by presenting an Opportunistic Relaying Protocol (ORP) for stationary topologies. Given a route in the form of possible choices for next hops and given the knowledge of the corresponding link channel qualities, we propose to choose the path that minimizes the net transmission delay of the packet. We perform an extensive simulation study of our protocol and present general guidelines in the design of a multi-rate MAC protocol.