SGER: Soft Information Capturing and Exploitation in Multi-Hop Ad hoc Networks

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Paulraj Abstract Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, when a packet is forwarded by a node, many nodes other than the intended node overhear this transmission. The goal of this project is to exploit a new concept of capturing/exploiting soft information at nodes in a multi-hop ad hoc network. Storing appropriate information from these overheard transmissions and its subsequent reuse can increase multi-hop throughput performance. This appears to be a new idea with significant potential to improve throughput and scalability of multi-hop networks. The nodes in such networks will need large storage capabilities to exploit this technique. However, with the dramatic reduction of memory costs, this is now economically feasible. A variety of issues related to developing this new concept will be explored: (a) Scalability of the network throughput with increasing node density, with varying path loss exponent and in the presence of time selective fading. (b) Appropriate format or metrics for soft information captured from overheard packets (c) Memory requirements as a function of node density and other related parameters.