The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Cooperative and opportunistic communication techniques in wireless networks promise significant performance benefits over traditional methods that do not exploit the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions. However, such techniques generally require coordination among the participating nodes, e.g. to discover available neighbors or negotiate the best course of action after every packet broadcast. The associated coordination overheads negate much of the cooperation benefits for applications with strict latency requirements, or in networks with highly dynamic topologies. This talk will highlight distributed cooperation strategies, where each node overhearing a packet decides independently whether to retransmit it, without explicit coordination with the source, intended receiver, or other neighbours in the vicinity. We formulate two non-traditional optimization problems that arise in this context, present their solution methodology and demonstrate the superior performance attained by the respective strategies.