A Unified Metric for Correlated Diversity in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Recent pioneer work has shown that packet receptions on adjacent links are correlated, which contradicts the long held assumption that wireless links are statistically independent. Since wireless link correlation affects a wide range of protocol designs, it is essential to quantify the impact generically. In particular, this paper focuses on a unified transmission cost metric for diversity-based routing schemes, including opportunistic routing, network coding, and hybrid routing. This paper covers both unicast and broadcast. Compared with the legacy metrics, our metric provides a direct and accurate estimation of the transmission cost in the presence of link correlation. The new metric helps a wide range of routing algorithms determine when they can benefit from reception diversity, and how to maximize the benefit, at negligible costs. We evaluate the metric on one 802.11 test bed and three 802.15.4 test beds running TelosB, MICAz, and GreenOrbs nodes. The experimental results show that our metric 1) reduces 92% and 94% of the estimation error of the transmission cost in unicast and broadcast and 2) outperforms the link independent metric in both unicast and broadcast applications.