In order to adapt to time-varying wireless channels, various channel-adaptive schemes have been proposed to exploit inherent spatial diversity in mobile/wireless ad hoc networks where there are usually alternate next-hop relays available at a given forwarding node. However, current schemes along this line are designed based on heuristics, implying room for performance enhancement. Thereby, to seek a theoretical foundation for improving spatial diversity gain, we formulate the selection of the next-hop as a sequential decision problem and propose a general "Optimal Stopping Relaying (OSR)" framework for designing such next-hop diversity schemes. As a particular example, assuming Rayleigh fading channels, we implement an OSR strategy to optimize information efficiency (IE) in a protocol stack consisting of Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) and IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols. We present mathematical analysis of the proposed OSR together with other strategies in the literatur...
Jing Ai, Alhussein A. Abouzeid, Zhenzhen Ye