Delay-tolerant cooperative diversity routing MANET

Some mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) such as inter-vehicle communications require a transmission scheme that is robust to mobility and asynchronous reception with low setup overhead. However, many existing cooperative MANETs have complex MAC protocol and high overhead. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer design across the routing, MAC and PHY layers, called delay-tolerant cooperative diversity routing (DT-CDR) MANET, in which network nodes work cooperatively to enhance the robustness of routing through cooperative space-time transmission. We construct a delay-tolerant orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) that supports low-complexity symbolwise decoding in the PHY layer. Due to the delay-tolerant code, strict synchronism is no longer required, hence simple MAC protocol is possible. Performance comparisons between the proposed DT-CDR MANET and conventional routing MANETs show that our design can significantly improve the end-to-end robustness and achieve cooperative diversity.