Building Cross-Layer Corridors in Wireless Multihop Networks

Corridor-based Routing widens traditional hop-by-hop paths to enable advanced physical layer mechanisms in Wireless Multihop Networks. The key concept is to let groups of nodes cooperate to jointly forward data. Instead of establishing a path formed by a fixed sequence of nodes, the network layer builds a "corridor" from source to destination to allow for such an approach. The corridor is divided into stages, which consist of the aforementioned groups of nodes. Existing mechanisms for Corridor-based Routing focus on the physical layer and assume a routing protocol that builds the corridor. In this paper, we design a corridor construction algorithm and a practical protocol that implements it. In particular, we address in detail the overhead introduced by our protocol, since this is crucial for performance and an open issue of Corridor-based Routing. We implement our approach both in simulation and practice. We obtain the turning point at which corridors become profitable and show that our protocol builds corridors, which enable throughput gains up to 74%