Experimental Evaluation of Multihop-Aware Cooperative Relaying

Through real-world measurements we evaluate the impact of multihop-aware cooperative relaying on end-to-end route performance in wireless multi-hop networks. In an experiment with 50 devices in an industrial environment cooperative relaying increases the end-to-end transmission reliability for multi-hop links to nearly 100% while reducing the average packet delay. We suggest how to include relay selection in the route discovery process of ad hoc routing protocols such as Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and perform two experiments. In the first experiment we discuss route discovery strategies focusing on small delay benefiting from reliable data link transmissions using cooperative relays. In the second experiment we compare reliability and delay for five different transmission powers with and without cooperative relaying.