Cluster-based Cooperative Data Forwarding with Multi-radio Multi-channel for Multi-flow Wireless Networks

Cooperative forwarding has shown a substantial network performance improvement compared to traditional routing in multi-hop wireless network. To further enhance the system throughput, especially in the presence of highly congested multiple cross traffic flows, a promising way is to incorporate the multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) capability into cooperative forwarding. However, it requires to jointly address multiple issues. These include radio-channel assignment, routing metric computation, candidate relay set selection, candidate relay prioritization, data broadcasting over multi-radio multi-channel, and best relay selection using a coordination scheme. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient cluster-based cooperative data forwarding (CCDF) which jointly addresses all these issues. We study the performance impact when the same candidate relay set is being used for multiple cross traffic flows in the network. The network simulation shows that the CCDF with MRMC not only retains the advantage of receiver diversity in cooperative forwarding but also minimizes the interference, which therefore further enhances the system throughput for the network with multiple cross traffic flows.