On the design of a quality-of-service driven routing protocol for wireless cooperative networks

In this paper, a quality-of-service driven routing protocol is proposed for wireless cooperative networks. The key contribution of the proposed protocol is to bring the performance gain of cooperative diversity from the physical layer up to the networking layer. Specifically, the proposed protocol uses a distributed algorithm to select the best relays based on link quality to form cooperative links for establishing a route with appropriate error performance from a source to a destination node. Furthermore, analytical results are developed to show that the proposed distributed routing protocol can perform close to the optimal in terms of error performance, especially for linear network topologies. Monte-Carlo simulation results are also provided for performance evaluation.