Corridor-based Routing using opportunistic forwarding in Multi-hop OFDMA networks

In multi-hop networks, conventional unipath routing approaches force the data transmission to follow a fixed sequence of nodes. In this project, this path is extended to create a corridor of forwarding nodes. Within this corridor, data can be split and joined at different nodes, as the data travels through the corridor towards the destination node. To split data, decode-and-forward OFDMA is used since with OFDMA, one can exploit the benefits of opportunistically allocating different subcarriers to different nodes, according to their channel conditions. To avoid interference, each subcarrier is only allocated once per hop. For the presented scheme, the problem of optimizing the network throughput by means of resource and power allocation is formulated and suboptimal algorithms are proposed to solve this problem with feasible effort. Simulations show that in multi-hop networks corridor-based routing using opportunistic forwarding outperforms conventional unipath routing approaches in terms of achievable throughput. The goal of this project is the further development and analysis of opportunistic forwarding approaches and a comparison with conventional routing approaches.