— Space-time communications can help combat fading and hence can significantly increase the capacity of ad hoc networks. Cooperative diversity or virtual antenna arrays facilitate spatio-temporal communications without actually requiring the deployment of physical antenna arrays. Virtual MISO entails the simultaneous transmission of appropriately encoded information by multiple nodes to effectively emulate a transmission on an antenna array. We present a novel multi-layer approach for exploiting virtual MISO links in ad hoc networks. The approach spans the physical, medium access control and routing layers and provides: (a) a significant improvement in the end-to-end performance in terms of throughput and delay and, (b) robustness to mobility and interference induced link failures. The key physical layer property that we exploit is an increased transmission range due to achieved the diversity gain. Except for space-time signal processing capabilities, our design does not require an...
Gentian Jakllari, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Micha