Based on a stochastic geometry framework, we establish an analysis of the multi-hop spatial reuse aloha protocol (MSR-Aloha) in ad hoc networks. We compare MSR-Aloha to a simple routing strategy, where a node selects the next relay of the treated packet as to be its nearest receiver with a forward progress toward the final destination (NFP). In addition, performance gains achieved by employing adaptive antenna array systems are quantified in this paper. We derive a tight upper bound on the spatial density of progress of MSR-Aloha. Our analytical results demonstrate that the spatial density of progress scales as the square root of the density of users, and the optimal contention density (that maximizes the spatial density of progress) is independent of the density of users. These two facts are consistent with the observations of , established through an analytical lower bound and through simulations.
This paper is meant to be an illustration of the use of stochastic geometry for analyzing the performance of routing in large wireless ad hoc (mobile or mesh) networks. In classical routing strategies used in such networks, packets are transmitted on a pre-defined route that is usually obtained by a shortest-path routing protocol. In this paper we review some recent ideas concerning a new routing technique which is opportunistic in the sense that each packet at each hop on its (specific) route from an origin to a destination takes advantage of the actual pattern of nodes that captured its recent (re)transmission in order to choose the next relay. The paper focuses both on the distributed algorithms allowing such a routing technique to work and on the evaluation of the gain in performance it brings compared to classical mechanisms. On the algorithmic side, we show that it is possible to implement this opportunistic technique in such a way that the current transmitter of a given packet does not need to know its next relay a priori, but the nodes that capture this transmission (if any) perform a self-selection procedure to choose the packet relay node and acknowledge the transmitter. We also show that this routing technique works well with various medium access protocols (such as Aloha, CSMA, TDMA). Finally, we show that the above relay self-selection procedure can be optimized in the sense that it is the node that optimizes some given utility criterion (e.g. minimize the remaining distance to the final destination), which is chosen as the relay. The performance evaluation part is based on stochastic geometry and combines simulation as analytical models. The main result is that such opportunistic schemes very significantly outperform classical routing schemes when properly optimized and provided at least a small number of nodes in the network know their geographical positions exactly. The multihop spatial reuse Aloha (MSR-Aloha) protocol was recently introduced by Baccelli et aL, where each transmitter selects the receiver among its feasible next hops that maximizes the forward progress of the head of line packet towards its final destination. They identify the optimal medium access probability (MAP) that maximizes the spatial density of progress, defined as the product of the spatial intensity of attempted transmissions times the average per-hop progress of each packet towards its destination. We propose a variant called longest edge routing where each transmitter selects its longest feasible edge, and then identifies a packet in its backlog whose next hop is the associated receiver. The main contribution of this work (and of Baccelli et aL) is the use of stochastic geometry to identify the optimal MAP and the corresponding optimal spatial density of progress.  An Aloha-type access control mechanism for large mobile, multihop, wireless networks is defined and analyzed. This access scheme is designed for the multihop context, where it is important to find a compromise between the spatial density of communications and the range of each transmission. More precisely, the analysis aims at optimizing the product of the number of simultaneously successful transmissions per unit of space (spatial reuse) by the average range of each transmission. The optimization is obtained via an averaging over all Poisson configurations for the location of interfering mobiles, where an exact evaluation of signal over noise ratio is possible. The main mathematical tools stem from stochastic geometry and are spatial versions of the so-called additive and max shot noise processes. The resulting medium access control (MAC) protocol exhibits some interesting properties. First, it can be implemented in a decentralized way provided some local geographic information is available to the mobiles. In addition, its transport capacity is proportional to the square root of the density of mobiles which is the upper bound of Gupta and Kumar. Finally, this protocol is self-adapting to the node density and it does not require prior knowledge of this density.