Cooperative forwarding in multi-radio multi-channel multi-flow wireless networks

Cooperative forwarding has shown a substantial network performance improvement compared to traditional routing in multi-hop wireless networks. 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 has been said that incorporating MRMC into cooperative forwarding can be considered as a trade-off between multiplexing and spatial diversity and what choice the neighbouring nodes should make is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose a new cooperative forwarding mechanism for multi-radio multi-channel multi-flow wireless networks. The performance is studied in highly congested network and under the situation where the same set of forwarding candidates is being used for multiple flows. Performance evaluation shows that the integrated mechanism achieves about 200% of throughput improvement compared to the single-radio single-channel case.