1

Achievable Performance Improvements

Provided by Route Diversity in Multihop
Wireless Networks
Stephan Bohacek
University of Delaware
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Newark, DE 19716
bohacek@udel.edu

Abstract
When considering many paths in a multihop wireless setting, the variability of channels results in
some paths providing better performance than other paths, i.e., path diversity. While it is well known that
some paths are better than others, a significant number of routing protocols do not focus on selecting the
optimal path. However, cooperative diversity, an area of recent interest, provides techniques to exploit
path and channel diversity. Here we examine the potential performance improvement when optimal
paths are used. Three settings are examined, where the path loss can be neglected, where path loss is
considered, but channel correlation is not accounted for, and where path loss and channel correlation are
accounted for. It is shown that path diversity can lead to dramatic improvements in performance. For

This work was prepared through collaborative participation in the Collaborative Technology Alliance for Communications
and Networks sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement DAAD19- 01-2-0011. The U.S.
Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation
thereon.

example, it is shown that in a 5-hop networks, improvements by a factor of 10-100 are not uncommon
and can reach a maximum of a factor of 2000 as the node density grows to infinity. An interesting
feature of path diversity is that when fully exploited, paths with more hops provide better performance
than those with fewer hops. It is shown that such behavior occurs when a particular map has a non-zero
fixed point.

I. I NTRODUCTION
One of the most important features of wireless networks is the variability of channels. In
traditional wireless networking, great pains are taken to mitigate the impacts of the variability of
channels. While all layers must cope with the effects of time-varying channels, there has been
extensive effort at the network layer. For example, there are a number of techniques that seek
to find precomputed backup paths (e.g., [1]-[9]). Thus, when the primary path fails, a new route
search is not required. However, time-varying channels does not only imply that links may break,
it also implies that some links are better than others. Indeed, in the context of communication
theory, channel diversity means that there may be some channels between the same transmitter
and receiver (but with different antennas) that have better performance than other channels. This
diversity is closely related to the stochastic nature of channels. For example, popular models for
the channel gain1 include the lognormal distribution, exponential distribution, and Nakagami. If
multiple transmit and/or receive antennas results in a set of channels that can be modeled as
independent random variables, then the larger the set of channels, the higher the probability that a
good channel can be found. While communication theory provides a clear picture of how through
the use of diversity, increasing the number of channels improves performance (e.g., Chapter 11
of [10]), diversity in the setting of multihop wireless networks is less well understood.
1

The received signal power is proportional to transmitted power multiplied by the channel gain.

This paper examines multihop paths in the presence of variable propagation. Specifically, this
paper determines the performance improvement that results when path diversity in multihop
networks is exploited as oppose to using an arbitrary or geographically optimal route. Several
insights are developed. For example, it is shown that in some settings when diversity is fully
exploited, if the link behavior is fixed, then longer paths perform better than shorter paths.
This behavior contrasts intuition which dictates that if the behavior of the links is fixed, then
shorter paths are better than longer paths. It will be shown that the settings when longer paths
are better than shorter paths depends on the existence of a fixed point of a particular onedimensional map. This paper also focuses on developing techniques to compute or estimate
the performance improvement offered by diversity. In the example considered, it is shown that
under the lognormal propagation model, as the density of nodes increases, exploiting diversity
and improve the performance by as much as 33 dB, or approximately a factor of 2000.
At first glance, an improvement of a factor of several thousand seems unreasonably large.
However, one must consider that the dynamic range of a physical layer such as 802.11 exceeds
50 dB. That is, a good channel may be 50 dB better than a bad channel, i.e., a good channel
is 100000 times better than a bad channel. The critical challenge for communication theorists
is to achieve communication even when the channel is bad. However, at the network layer,
there is the option of seeking to use other channels. If these channels are sufficiently better,
then one might well expect an improvement of several orders of magnitude. In [11] a diversity
seeking protocol is described that is able to attain improvements of several orders of magnitude.
One important difference between [11] and this paper, is that this paper develops a number
of techniques to compute the performance analytically, whereas [11] relies on simulation. As a
result, the techniques developed here can be easily applied to other settings and the opportunities
of path diversity are more fully explored.

This paper has three major sections, IV, V, and VII, that correspond to investigations of
diversity in three settings. In the first of these, a simple and highly tractable situation is examined.
Specifically, in general the channel gain has a stochastic part and a deterministic part. The
deterministic part is called path loss and is a function of the distance between nodes. In this first
investigation, this path loss part is neglected, only the stochastic part of the channel is considered.
This setting provides insight into the performance in more general settings. For example, in this
setting, the behavior of longer paths as compared to shorter paths is explored. While this behavior
can be carefully examined in this simple setting, similar behavior will be noticeable in the more
realistic settings that are investigated in Section V and VII. Section IV also introduces some
techniques that are expanded upon in Sections V and VII. In these sections a particular topology
is studied. However, the techniques can be applied other topologies. Section V focuses on the
case when the nodes are reasonably far apart. Specifically, they are far enough apart that the
correlation between channel gains of nearby channels can be safely neglected. The main focus of
this section is examining the performance and demonstrating that if the network is large enough,
then a particular dependence can be neglected. The result is that the performance of networks
can be easily computed even if the network is quite large. Furthermore, Section V provides
insight into when the path loss can be neglected and hence the analysis of Section IV, which
neglects path loss, accurately predicts the performance. Section VII extends Section V to the
case where the nodes may be closer together and hence the performance of links are correlated.
Accounting for this correlation allows the evaluation of the performance when the density of the
nodes grows to infinity. In this section that it is shown that the performance improvement over
a particular 5-hop network may reach 33 dB.
The paper proceeds as follows. In the next section a brief overview of related work is
presented. In Section III, the problem definition is provided along with several basic assumptions.

Sections IV, V, and VII then present the main results, as mentioned above. Section IX illustrates
the performance offered by diversity when the propagation is based of realistic ray-tracing of
downtown Dallas, TX. The behaviors illustrated throughout the paper is also observed in this
realistic setting. However, a more detailed examination of diversity in various networks is left
for future work. Finally, Section X provides some concluding remarks.

II. R ELATED WORK

As mentioned above, communication theory provides a good understanding of the impact of
exploiting diversity when the transmitter and receiver have several antennas. However, recently,
there has been interest in examining the impact of allowing nearby nodes assist in a transmission
[12]-[18]. Several strategies were investigated in [17] and [18]. However, in most cases, small
one/two hop networks were investigated. Specifically, it is often assumed that the source can
directly communicate with the destination (i.e., one hop). Furthermore, it is assumed that one
or more intermediate nodes are available to increase reliability (i.e., two hops). In [14], several
techniques for communicating over such networks were investigated. One technique, known
as selection relaying, utilizes channel measurements to determine which nodes should transmit.
While selection relaying does not require feedback, another method, incremental relaying, makes
use of feedback to determine which and whether nodes should transmit. This strategy proved
to yield good performance. While [14] focuses on the setting with one relay, [16] examines the
one/two hop case, but with a large number of nodes available to act as the relay. There it was
found that a technique referred to as best-select provided the best performance of the techniques
investigated. In best-select, the node with the best channel is selected to transmit. This best-select
approach is similar to the ideas pursued here. Specifically, in best-select, the best path is found
among the two-hop paths. In this paper, the performance achieved when the best path among

multihop paths is utilized.

Route diversity is a well known concept in multihop networks. However, route diversity, as it
is often used in the literature, and exploiting diversity, as is studied in this paper, are related, but
slightly different concepts. Typically, in the literature, route diversity implies that when different
routes are collected during the route search phase of a routing protocol, the routes are distinct
in the sense that the routes do not share common links and perhaps do not even share common
nodes (e.g., see [1]-[9]). Here the set of routes considered will share common links and nodes.
On the other hand, both route diversity and the type of diversity considered here embrace the
stochastic nature of links.
While there are a large number of protocols that precompute a set of back-up paths and select
a path from this set when the current path fails, [2] selects a new route frequently in order to
improve the end-to-end performance. Here, we will investigate the performance improvement that
could be achieved by such an algorithm. While some performance analysis was undertaken in
[2], a free-space or 2-ray model for propagation was used, whereas here, more realistic stochastic
propagation is used. In [11] and [19], various performance issues related to diversity seeking
protocols are investigated.
III. P ROBLEM D EFINITION
This paper focuses on the topology shown in Figure 1. The figure shows the source and
destination as well as several sets of nodes that are made up of nodes placed in a vertical line.
As indicated in the figure, these sets are called relay-sets. The relay-sets are numbered with the
first relay-set being closest to the source. It is assumed that each transmission carries the packet
from a node in the n-th relay-set to a node in the (n + 1)-th relay-set, but the exact node within
each relay-set that relays the packet can be adjusted. As is also indicated in Figure 1, the nodes
are labeled with node (n, i) being the i-th node in the n-th relay-set. We assume that the number

node (n, 2Range/h)

source

destination

2Range

node (n,1)
1st
relay-set

2nd
relay-set

(N-1)th
relay-set

Fig. 1. The objective is to find the best path from source to destination. The nominal path is made up of the nodes along
the center. In this paper, we explore the impact of being allowed to use any combination of nodes. However, each hop must be
between two nodes in adjacent relay-sets and the route must always proceed toward the destination. The distance between the
relay-sets is d, and the space between adjacent nodes is h. Each relay-set spans a vertical distance 2 Range.

of nodes in each relay-set is fixed, and is sometimes denoted as M. Sometimes it is convenient

to think of the source as a node in the zeroth relay-set, i.e., (0, bM/2c), there bM/2c is the
largest integer that is less than or equal to M/2. Similarly, the destination is (N, bM/2c).
There are several ways that a path can be selected. A simple approach is to utilize the path that
is made up of the nodes along the center, i.e., the shortest geographical path. This is the nominal
route. Alternatively, the path utilized could be the path that is best in terms of a particular route
metric. Here the route metric of interest is the maximum channel loss2 along the route. That is,
each link of a path has a particular channel loss, and the route metric is the maximum of these
link channel losses. To put it another way, the route metric is the channel loss of the worst link
along the route. This paper examines the performance gain that is achieved by using a route that
is optimal in terms of this route metric as compared to the nominal route.
Since the received signal strength is proportional to the transmitted power divided by the
channel loss, the channel loss is closely related to the SNR. Hence, minimizing the maximum
channel loss is the same as maximizing the minimum SNR experience by each receiver along
2

The channel loss is the recipocal of the channel gain. Hence, a good channel has a small channel loss.

the route. There are several motivations for trying to minimizing the maximum channel loss. For
example, in most physical layer schemes, the probability of a transmission error across a link falls
to zero quickly as the SNR increases beyond a threshold. Thus, the probability of successfully
delivering a packet to a destination along a route is dominated by the probability of successfully
transmitting a packet over the worst link along the route. Similarly, if the transmission power at
each link is adjusted so that a target SNR is met (e.g., to meet a target link transmission error
probability), then the energy to deliver a packet from the source to destination is dominated by
the energy required to transmit across the worst link along the path. Also, if the bit-rate across
each link is maximized under the constraint that the transmission error probability is less than
a specified threshold, then the throughput along the route is given by the bit-rate across the
slowest link, which, again, is the worst link along the route in terms of channel gain. See [11],
for further examination of metrics.
It is common to decompose the channel loss into two parts, a deterministic part that depends
on the distance between the nodes, and a stochastic part. In particular, the channel loss, in dB,
is
Channel loss [dB] = X 10 log10 (d)

(1)

where X accounts for the stochastic part, d is the distance between the transmitter and receiver,
and is the path loss exponent. While has been found to be as small as 1.7 and as large as
4, for sake on concreteness, we use = 2.7 following the findings presented in [20]. Clearly,
the computations can be performed with a different value of a. While there are many possible
distributions of L, in Sections V and VII it is assumed that X models the effect of shadowing
and is a lognormally distributed. On the other hand, the techniques in Section IV can easily be
applied for any distribution. One reason that the stochastic part of the channel loss in Sections

V and VII only accounts for shadowing and not multipath fading is that this paper focuses on
wide band communication where the impact of multipath fading is mitigated (see, for example,
page 330 in [20]).

IV. P ERFORMANCE WITHOUT PATH LOSS AND WITHOUT CHANNEL LOSS CORRELATION
This section analyzes the case when the deterministic part of the channel loss is neglected.
There are two reasons for considering this setting. First, with this simplification, analytic expressions for performance can be derived and the impact of diversity can be carefully examined. As
will be seen in the following sections, the behavior that arises here, also occurs in other more
general scenarios where analytic expressions are more difficult to attain. A second motivation
for neglecting the deterministic part of the channel loss is when considering scenarios where the
nodes within a relay-set are far enough apart so that the correlation between nearby channels
can be neglected and the size of the relay-set is much smaller than the distance between the
relay-sets, i.e., Range d and h 1. Note that since h < Range, this implies that d 1. In
this case, the distance between nodes in adjacent relay-sets is d + Range with [1, 1],
thus from (1), the channel loss is

X10 log10 (d + Range) X10 (log10 (d) + Range/d) X10 log10 (d) ,
where the last approximation holds since Range d and d 1 and d is a fixed constant.
Hence, the variability of the channel loss is only due to the variability of X, the stochastic part
of the channel loss.
The objective of the following analysis is to determine the expected performance, in terms of
the metric discussed above. We are specifically interested in how the performance is impacted
by the topology, namely, the size of relay-sets and the number of hops. The first step toward

10

this objective is to determine the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the optimal value of
the route metric, i.e., P (the channel loss of the worst link along the best path is less than r).
To this end, we utilize the terminology of percolation theory. Fixing the channel loss at r, we
say that a link is open if the channel loss is less than r and is closed otherwise. Furthermore,
we say that a node is occupied if there is a sequence of open links from the source to the node.
Hence, letting F be the CDF of the channel loss, the probability of a link being open is F (r).
With r fixed, we often denote the probability that a link is open with p and the probability the
link is closed with q = 1 p. Moreover, the source is always occupied and the destination is
occupied if there is an end-to-end route with maximum channel loss less than r. Given that the
probability that a link is open is p, we denote the probability that the destination is occupied
as TM,N (p), where there are M nodes in each relay-set and N hops between the source and
destination. Since

P (the channel loss of the worst link along the best path is less than r) = Tm,N (F (r)) , (2)

the CDF we desire can be easily computed once T is known. The following provides an efficient
way to compute T .
Proposition 1: With the definitions given above,

TM,N (p) = 1p,m (1, :) N2

1p,M V1p,M ,

(3)

where q,M is a (M + 1) (M + 1) matrix with the i, j element given by

j
M
q,M (i, j) :=
1 q i q i(Mj) ,
j
1p,M (1, :) is the first row of q,M , i.e. q,M (1, :) :=

q,M (1, 0) q,M (1, M) , and

11

Vq,M is the (M + 1) 1 column vector given by Vq,M (j) = (1 q j ). Note that the indexes i
and j range from 0 to M.
With (3), the expected impact of diversity can be determined. Letting un be the expect number
of occupied nodes in the relay-set that is k hops from the source, then the above proposition
can be used to compute un . Specifically, we have the following.
Corollary 2: The expected number of occupied nodes in the relay-set that is n hops from the
source is given by

un

= E (number of occupied nodes n hops from the source)

(4)

= q,M (1, :) n1
q,M W,

where W is the (M + 1) 1 column vector with W (j) = j where j = 0, 1, , M.

Proof: [Proof of Proposition 1] To determine T , the number of occupied nodes is represented
as a Markov chain. Suppose that i nodes are occupied in the relay-set that is n hops from the
source. Then, the probability that a particular node that is n + 1 hops from the source is not
occupied is the probability that none of the links from the i occupied nodes in the previous
relay-set are open. This probability is q i . And hence, the number of occupied nodes in the relayset that is (n + 1) hops from the source is a binomial random variable with parameters (1 q i )
and M. Thus, q,M (i, j) is the probability that j nodes are occupied in the relay-set that is n+1
hops from the source given that i nodes are occupied in the relay-set that is n hops from the
source. Since the source is always occupied, there is one node occupied in the relay-set that is
zero hops from the source. Therefore, q,M (1, :) is the probability distribution of the number
of occupied nodes in the first relay-set. In general, setting v := q,M (1, :) n1
q,M , we see that
v (j) is the probability that exactly j nodes are occupied within the relay-set that is n hops from

12

the source. Finally, the probability that the destination is occupied given that i nodes within the
last relay-set are occupied is 1 qi . Therefore, the right-hand side of (3) is the probability the
destination is occupied.
An important feature of multihop diversity is demonstrated by the fact that for some p, M and
N, we have TM,N (p) > p. That is, the probability of finding an end-to-end path such that each
link along the path has a channel loss that is less than some r is greater than the probability of
finding a single link that achieves that same level of performance. Or to put it another way, the
best path is better than the typical link.
To explore this feature further, define p+ to be the crossover probability, where p+ satisfies
TM,N (p+ ) = 0.5. For example, if the channel statistics are such that the probability of the
channel loss being less than 40 dB is p+ , then with probability 0.5, the best end-to-end path
consist of links where each link has a channel loss that is less than 40 dB. Figure 2 shows p+
as a function of M, the relay-set size, and N, the number of hops from source to destination.
Note that for large M, the p+ is considerably smaller than 0.5, i.e., TM,N (p+ ) > p+ . Hence, in
these situations, one can expect that the best end-to-end path will perform better than the typical
single link.
A remarkable feature of multihop diversity illustrated by Figure 2 is that for large enough
M, we find that p+ decreases as N increases. Consider the case of M = 1, i.e., where diversity
is not used. In this case, it is clear that if each link achieves a particular level of performance
with probability p, then all links along the path will achieve this level of performance with
probability pN , therefore p+ = 0.51/N , which increases with N, the length of the connection.
This implies that in order to achieve a desired end-to-end performance, each links performance
must exceed the desired end-to-end performance. Furthermore, as the length of the connection
grows, each links performance is required to further improve if the end-to-end performance is

13

0.6

N=2
N=3
N=4
N=20

0.4

0.6

0.2

5
10
15
M - size of relay-set

mean field

0.8

0.4

0.2
0

Expected fraction
of nodes occupied

p+

0.8

actual

20

p=0.75 M=4
p=0.5 M=8
p=0.25 M=15
p=0.05 M=100
2
3
4
5
6
N hops from source

Fig. 2. Left: Suppose that is it desired that with a probability of at least 0.5, there exists a path such that each link along the
path has a particular property (e.g., minimum SNR for each hop is above r). By exploiting diversity, this objective can be met
as long as each link has this property with probability at least p+ (e.g., the probability of the link SNR exceeding r is p+ ). The
above shows the relationship between p+ , N the number of hops in the path, and M the number of nodes in each relay-set.
Right: Mean field estimate of the mean number of occupied nodes and the actual number of occupied nodes as a function of
the number of hops from the source.

to be achieved. However, as shown in Figure 2, for M > 3, the opposite is true; as the length
of the connection grows, each links performance can be degraded and the desired end-to-end
performance can still be achieved. Similarly, if each links performance is held constant, then
longer paths will perform better than shorter paths.
This counter-intuitive behavior of diversity is further investigated in the next section. However,
we note that a special case of this behavior is illustrated by TM,N (p) > p, which implies that a
multihop path is better than a typical single link, which is a single hop path.
1) The Impact of Long Paths - A Mean Field Analysis: In this subsection the conditions
under which longer paths provide better performance than shorter paths are investigated. It will
be shown that these conditions are related to the existence of a non-zero attracting fixed point of
a particular one-dimensional map. However, a more intuitive reasoning is as follows. Consider
a single hop network. In this case, the performance is dictated by a single link. However, in
a two-hop network, the end-to-end performance is given by the best of M disjoint paths. In a
three-hop network, the end-to-end performance is given by the best of M 2 non-disjoint paths.
Thus, we see that as the number of hops grows, the number of paths grows very quickly. Since

14

the performance of each path is random (they may be correlated, but are not perfectly correlated),
the more paths considered, the better the performance. On the other hand, since the performance
of a single path is dictated by the worst link along the path, the performance of a single path
will decrease as its length grows. Hence, there are two contradicting mechanisms, one causes
performance to increase as the path length increases, while the other causes the performance to
decrease as path length increases. As will be detailed next, if the probability that the performance
of links is above a threshold, then the benefit of more paths is more significant than the impact
of longer paths, and performance tends to increase with path length. A detailed analysis is as
follows3 .
In the proof of Theorem 1, it is shown that if there are i nodes occupied in the n-th relay-set,
then the mean number of nodes occupied in the (n + 1)-th relay-set is (1 q i ) M. Employing
a type of mean field analysis, we assume that if there are i nodes occupied within the n-th
relay-set, then there are exactly (1 q i ) M nodes occupied within the (n + 1)-th relay-set. The
right-hand plot in Figure 2 compares this mean field model to the exact computation. Under the
mean field model, define un to be number of nodes occupied in the n-th relay-set. It follows

that u1 = (1 q) M, and un+1 = 1 qun M. This one-dimensional dynamical system can be

normalized by defining u = u/M and q = q M , yielding

un+1 = 1 qun .

(5)

The dynamics of (5) can be examined using the standard tools for analyzing one-dimensional
maps of iteration (e.g., Chap. 2 of [21]).
The key question is whether (5) has any stable equilibrium, that is, we seek the different
possible values of limn un . In the case that there is a stable equilibrium, we check whether
3

The remainder of this subsection can be skipped without loss of continuity.

15

convergence to the equilibrium is monotonic or not. It is important to note that the existence of
an equilibrium u with u > 1/M and monotonic variation of un implies that the mean number
of occupied nodes increases with n, the number of hops from the source. Clearly, the more
nodes that are occupied within the (N 1)th relay-set, the more likely that the destination will
be occupied. Thus, if u > 1/M, then the destination is more likely to be occupied if the path is
longer, that is, longer paths provide better performance (in terms of this metric). The following
characterizes when this occurs.
Proposition 3: The map (5) has a non-zero attracting equilibrium, u , if qM < 1/e. If q M
1/e, then u = 0 is the only equilibrium and is attracting. If u0 < u (
u0 > u ), then the sequence
un for n = 0, 1, is monotonically increasing (decreasing).

Proof: Define g (
un ) = un+1 un = 1 qun un . Then g 0 (
u) =
qu ln (
q )1. Note that

g (0) = 0, implies that u = 0 is a fixed point. Furthermore, g 0 (0) > 0 if and only if ln (
q) > 1
or
q < 1/e,

(6)

or, equivalently, q M < 1/e. In this case, un+1 un = g (

un ) > 0 for un 0 and positive. Thus,
u = 0 is a non-attracting fixed point if and only if (6) holds.
Now, suppose that (6) holds. Since g (1) =
q < 0 and g (
u) > 0 for u small and positive,
the Intermediate Value Theorem implies that there must be a point u between 0 and 1 such that
g (
u ) = 0. Thus, if (6) holds, then g has at least two zeros. To see that there are exactly zeros,
note that g 00 (
u) =
q u (ln (q))2 < 0.
Next we show that un is monotonic. If (6) holds, then g 0 (0) > 0. And since g (0) = 0, we
have g (
u) > 0 for u (0, u ), or, equivalently, un+1 > un for u (0, u ). Similarly, since
g (
u ) = 0 and g 0 (0) > 0, we have g 0 (
u ) < 0 and hence g (
u) < 0 for u > u , or equivalently,

~u 0.5

actual
fitted

0.1

0.2
~q

0.3

0.4

Number of hops to convergence

16

Solid lines: actual Dash line: fitted

7
6

~u =0.001
0
~u =0.01
0
~u =0.1
0
~
u0=0.2
~u =1/3
0

5
4
3
2
1
0

0.01

0.02
~
q

0.03

0.04

Fig. 3. Left: For q that satisfies (6), there is a non-zero fixed point that solves (5) such that limk u
k = u
. The above

shows the value of u

for different q. Also, an approximation of this relationship is shown. Right: The number of occupied
nodes converges as the number of hops increases. The above shows the number of hops required to reach 10% of the final
value. The number of hops to convergence depends on q and the u
, which depend on M and q. Approximations to the required
length of the connection also shown.

un+1 < un . On the other hand,

d
d
u

q) 0. This implies that 1 qu < 1 qw

1 qu =
q u ln (

if u < w. Thus, if un < u , then un+1 = 1 qun < 1 qu = u and if un > u , then
un+1 > u . In summary, if u0 < u , then un < u and un+1 > un ; in other words, un is
monotonically increasing. Similarly, if u0 > u , then un is monotonically decreasing. And in
both cases, limn un = u . In a similar fashion it can be shown that un is monotonically
decreasing when u0 > 0 and (6) does not hold.
By repeatedly evaluating (5), u can be estimated. Figure 3 shows the relationship between q
and the non-zero fixed point u . This relationship was found to be well approximated by
q 2 (5.6/e + e) q + 1.
u 5.6

(7)

This approximation is also shown in Figure 3. It should be noted that for fixed q < 1, we have
limM q M = limM q = 0. Hence, limM u = 1, implying that an increasing fraction of
the nodes within the relay-set will be occupied as the size of the relay-set increases.
The question of whether longer paths are better than shorter paths can be resolved by deter-

17

mining if (6) holds and if u given by (7) exceeds 1/M. On the other hand, as can be seen in left
hand plot in Figure 2, the incremental increase in performance due to the incremental lengthening
of the path tends to decrease as the path length increases. This is due to the convergence of the
un . Figure 3 shows the number of hops when un reaches 10% of its final value. This relationship
is shown for various q and initial values of u0 . For small values of q, the number of hops is
approximated by 1 + (1 ln (
u0 )) / ln (1 ln (
q )). Note that as q increases, the number of hops
until the mean number of occupied nodes converges increase. While it is not shown here, this
value grows very quickly as q nears 1/e. However, for q 1/e the mean field analysis is less
accurate. Figure 3 shows that reasonably short paths are sufficient to fully exploit diversity.
Remark 4: While this analysis implies that long paths have some benefits, there are other
drawbacks to long paths that are not modeled here. See [22] for a discussion of some advantages
of shorter paths.

A. Examples of multihop diversity gain

The performance analysis above applies to any channel loss model. However, since much of
the rest of this paper focuses on scenarios where the channel is impaired by lognormal shadow
fading, this section only examines the performance under lognormal fading. As discussed in
Section III, the performance metric of interest here is the expected value of the channel loss of
the worst link along the best path. The average performance can easily be found from (2), where
TM,N is found using Proposition 1 and F is the CDF of a lognormal distribution with mean 0
dB and in dB. The average value of the worst channel loss along the best path is compared
to the average channel loss of the worst link along an arbitrarily selected path. Specifically,
we consider the improvement, in dB, provided by the best path as compared to an arbitrarily
selected path. An improvement of 0 dB implies no improvement at all.

Mean improvement in
signal strength (dB)

18

15

=4

=8

30

40

14-hops
10

=11

30

20

15
10

20 nodes/RS
15 nodes/RS
10 nodes/RS
5 nodes/RS

20
5

10

0
0

10
M - relay-set size

20

0
0

10
M - relay-set size

10

2-hops
20

0
0

10
M - relay-set size

0
20 0

Fig. 4. The three left-hand plots show the improvement in the minimum channel gain along a path when using the optimal
path as compared to using an arbitrary path. The amount of improvement depends on the relay-set size and the number of hops.
The number of hops varies from 2 hops (the lower curves) to 14 hops (the upper curves). It is assumed that the channel is
impaired by shadow fading with parameters . The left three plots show the performance for different . The right-most plot
shows the improvement over an arbitrary path as the shadow fading parameter varies when the network has three hops. The
variation in performance is shown for relay-sets sizes ranging from 5 to 20.

The three left-hand plots in Figure 4 show the improvement provided by the best path for
different topologies and for values of . Each curve shows the variation of the improvement
as the number of nodes in each relay-set varies. As indicated, the curve that indicates the least
improvement corresponds to the case when there are two hops from source to destination while
the curve that provides the largest improvement corresponds to the case when there are 14 hops.
As expected, the improvement when there is one node in each relay-set is 0 dB, this is the case
where diversity cannot be exploited.
Lognormal shadow fading is parameterized by , the standard deviation in dB. Figure 4 shows
the performance improvement for = 4, 8, and 11 ([20] presents experimental results that
indicated that = 11.) The right-most plot shows the performance improvement as a function
of . As the standard deviation increases, the variability of the channel loss increases and the
performance improvement provided by diversity increases.

V. C ORRELATED NODE OCCUPANCY

While the analysis above provides a clear view into the performance gains that can be achieved
by exploiting diversity, it neglects path loss and hence is only directly applicable to settings

10

19

where Range d in Figure 1 and h is not too small. In this section the impact of path loss is
considered. While this section examines the actual value of the performance, the next subsection
presents a computationally efficient approximation of the performance when M is large. On the
other hand, this section does not consider correlated channels, which is covered in Section VII.
Considering the network depicted in Figure 1, the probability of transmitting from node (n, i)
q
to node (n + 1, j) depends on the relative distance between the nodes, d2 + h2 (i j)2 . As

discussed in Section III, the channel loss is log-normally distributed. Hence, the probability of
transmitting from node (n, i) to (n + 1, j) is denoted by gT hresh (|i j|) and is given by
q

2
d2 + h2 (i j) < T hresh ,
gT hresh (|i j|) := P X + 2.7 10 log10
where X is Gaussian with mean 0 and standard deviation , and T hresh such that if the channel
loss is less than T hesh, then the transmission can be decoded.
As is done in the previous section, we represent node occupancy with a Markov chain. Here
the state of the Markov chain is a vector of zeros and ones indicating which nodes are occupied.
Thus, a particular element of this state can be represented as an integer between 0 and 2M .

Specifically, let ai = 1 if the i-th node is occupied and ai = 0 otherwise. Then, this state is

P
i
represented by A 0, 2M 1 where A = M1
i=0 ai 2 . Thus, we can define QT hresh to be the

probability transition matrix via

QT hresh (A, B) := P (moving from state A to state B)

(8)

Y
Y
Y
Y
1

(1 gT hresh (|i j|))

(1 gT hresh (|i j|))
=
{i:bi =1}

{j:aj =1}

{i:bi =0}

{j:aj =1}

To understand (8), note that the probability of node (n + 1, i) not being occupied is the prob-

20

ability that each link from every occupied node in the previous relay-set being close, which is
Y
(1 qgT hresh (|i j|)) where {j : aj = 1} is the set of nodes in the nth relay-set that are
{j:aj =1}

occupied. Furthermore, the set of nodes that are occupied in state B is {i : bi = 1}. Thus, the
probability of being in state B is the probability that each node i is occupied only if bi = 1. Note
that Q is a 2M 2M dimensional matrix and the probability distribution is a 2M dimensional
vector.
From (8), it is straightforward to compute the probability distribution of the occupied nodes
within the n-th relay-set. Specifically, we can think of the source as a node within the bM/2c-th
node within the 0-th relay-set where bM/2c is M/2 rounded down to the nearest integer. Thus,
we set the probability distribution of the occupied nodes within the 0-th relay-set to be V with
VS = 1 if S = 2bM/2c . The probability distribution n hops from the source is V QnT hresh .

The destination can be thought of as the bM/2c-th node in the N-th relay-set. Given that the
probability distribution in the N-th relay-set is W , the probability that the bM/2c is occupied
is found by summing the elements of W over all the states that have the bM/2c occupied.
Specifically, set B to be a 2M row vector with B (S) = 1 if SbM/2c = 1. Then the probability
that the destination is occupied is

P (maximum channel loss along the best path < T hresh) = V QN

T hresh B.

(9)

Finally, from (9) the probability distribution of the channel loss along the best channel from
the source to destination can be found. Figure 5 shows the expected value of the maximum
channel loss along the best path as a function of the number of hops from source to destination
for M = 1, 2, 4, ...14 and distance between neighboring nodes within a relay-set is h = 20m and
h = 60m. In this case the standard deviation of the shadow fading was 11 dB and the distance
between relay-sets was 100m. Note that the M = 1 case is the case when there is only one

21

path from source to destination. Thus, as above, the M = 1 case corresponds to the case when
diversity is not exploited and hence represents the benchmark performance.
The analysis in Section IV assumed that range of the relay-set is far smaller than the distance
between relay-sets, i.e., Range d. Hence, for large d, the improvement in performance when
the path loss is accounted for should be similar to the performance found in Section IV. The
right-hand plot in Figure 5 examines the performance for several values of d and for relay-sets
with 6 and 12 nodes. In both cases, it can be seen that d = 200 yields similar results as d = 400;
the curves nearly lie on top of each other. However, for relay-sets with 6 nodes in each relayset, the performance for d = 100 or greater yields the same performance, while for 12 nodes in
each relay-set, the performance does not converge until d = 200. Thus, we can conclude that
the analysis in Section IV is valid for reasonably distance relay-sets (recall 802.11 may reach
distances of 100-500 m) and this is especially the case if there are relatively few nodes in each
relay-set. Note that the performance shown in the right-hand plot of Figure 5 for d = 400m is
similar to what is shown in Figure 4.
As was found in the case investigated in Section IV, we also find that the performance tends to
improve as the number of hops increases and as the relay-set size increases. Another characteristic
shown in Figure 5 is that as the size of the relay-set increases, the relative improvement in
performance decreases. In Figure 5, the largest relay-set size is 14. In this case, there are
214 elements in the state-space and the state transition matrix has 228 elements4 . With current
processors, this was the largest topology whose performance could be computed in a realistic
amount of time.

It is possible to compute the probability distributions without computing the entire state transition matrix.

h=20m
h=60m

70
60
50
40

10
Hops

15

Mean improvement in
signal strength (dB)

Average Best Min.

Channel Loss (dB)

22

20

30
20
d=50m
d=100m
d=200m
d=400m

10
0

10
15
Hops

20

Fig. 5. Left: Average maximum channel loss along the best path. The solid curves are for the case when h = 20m and the
marked curves are for h = 60m. The upper most curve is when there is only one node in each relay-set, i.e., when diversity is
not exploited. The curve is the same regardless of the value of h. As the size of the relay-sets grows, the maximum channel
loss decreases. This figure shows the performance for relay-set size of 1, 2, 4, 6, , 14. The best performance is indicated by
the lowest curve and corresponds to the case where M = 14. Right: The performance improvement (as compare to the nominal
path) for different spacings between relay-sets. Two sets of curves are shown. The upper set is for relay-sets with 12 nodes and
the lower set is for relay-sets with 6 nodes. Each set of curves consists of four curves corresponding to d = 50m to d = 400m.
The lowest curve in each set is for d = 50m. Note that the d = 50m for 12 nodes/relay-set is similar to the that of d = 400m
for 6 nodes/relay-set.

VI. A N A PPROXIMATION
A dramatic improvement in computation can be obtained by assuming that the occupancy of a
node is independent of whether other nodes within the same relay-set are also occupied. It will be
shown that this independence assumption provides an upper bound on performance. Furthermore,
it will be observed that for large relay-sets, this approximation provides independence assumption
does not have a significant impact on the accuracy.
First we compute the probability of occupancy under the independence assumption. Let the
probability that the j-th node in the n-th relay-set is occupied be Pn,T hresh (j). Then probability
that node i in the (n + 1)-th relay-set is occupied is

Pn+1,T hresh (i)

= 1
= 1

M
Y
j=1

M
Y
j=

((1 Pn,T hresh (j)) + (1 qT hresh (|i j|)) Pn,T hresh (j))
(1 qT hresh (|i j|) Pn,T hresh (j)) .

(10)

23

Error (dB)

4
2 node/RS
4 nodes/RS
6 nodes/RS
8 nodes/RS
10 nodes/RS
12 nodes RS
14 nodes/RS

3
2
1
0
0

10

15

Hops
Fig. 6. The difference between the exact value of the optimal value of the route metric and an approximation where the
approximation assumes that the occupancy of a node in a relay-set is independent of the occupancy of other nodes within the
same relay-set. This figure shows this error for networks with 2 - 14 nodes per relay-set and for networks with 2 to 20 hops.
Note that an error of 0 dB means that there is no error and an error of 3 dB means that the approximation suggests a performance
that is 3 dB better than the actual performance. The results here are for d = 100m and h = 20m.

As above, the fact that the source is occupied is expressed by P0,T hresh (i) = 1 for i = bM/2c
and 0 otherwise and note that the probability of there exits a path from source to destination
such that the maximum channel loss is less than T hresh is PN,T hresh (bM/2c). From this, the
performance can be efficiently approximated.
This approximation yields performance relationships that are quite similar to those shown in
Figure 5. Figure 6 shows the difference between the expected performance found using (10)
and (4). Note that for large networks the error is less than 1 dB and converges as the length
of the path grows. For smaller networks, the error is larger, but for small relay-set sizes, an
approximation is not needed since the actual performance can be easily computed. It can also be
noticed that the error is always positive implying that the approximation is always larger than
the actual value. This is always the case as explained next.
Proposition 5: The assumption that the event that a node is occupied is independent of the
event that other nodes within the same relay-set are occupied is leads to an upper bound on
performance.
Proof: Let Ui be the event that node (n, i) is occupied and node i has and open link to

24

node (n + 1, k). Then the probability that node (n + 1, k) is occupied is P

[
i

Ui

X
i

P (Ui )

X
i6=j

Ui

and

P (Ui Uj ) .

Under the assumption that the events Ui are independent

P

Ui

X
i

P (Ui )

P (Ui ) P (Uj ) ,

i6=j

where P denotes the probability under the independence assumption. However, since the events
Ui are increasing,
P (Ui Uj ) P (Ui ) P (Uj ) .
Thus P

[
i

[23].

Ui

[
i

(11)

Ui . For further discussion on increasing events see Chapter 2 of

VII. C ORRELATED C HANNELS

Figure 5 shows that the performance improves when either the size of the relay-sets increases or
if the spacing between nodes within the relay-set decreases. Both of these trends are reasonable;
as the size of the relay-sets increases, there are more paths available and hence the probability
that a good path is available increases. As the spacing between nodes within a relay-set decreases,
the quality of the paths from any single node to all the nodes in the next relay-set improves.
q
Specifically, recall that the distance between nodes (n, i) and (n + 1, j) is d2 + h2 (i j)2 ,

which decreases with h, the spacing between nodes within the same relay-set (see Figure 1).
Based on the trends shown in Figure 5, the question naturally arises as to what the maximum
performance that can be achieved by increasing the number of nodes in the relay-sets and by
decreasing the spacing between nodes within a relay-set. This question is answered in this section.

25

From Figure 5 it can be seen that as the size of the relay-sets grows, the incremental
improvement in performance decreases. This is decrease is due to the fact that for very large
relay-sets, a larger relay-set will only add nodes that are far from the shortest path (in terms
of distance). Thus, it becomes less likely that these nodes will be part of a best path. A more
complex issue is how the performance varies as the spacing between nodes within the relay-set
decrease. The complication arises from the fact that links between nearby nodes suffer from
correlated channel loss. To account for the correlation between channel loss, we use a model
the channel loss as a spatial Gaussian process. A similar approach is followed in [24] and [25].
We begin by analyzing the case where there are several links from a single transmitter to several
different destinations. Let L (a, b) denote the channel loss, in dB, due to shadow fading from
transmitter5 at location a to a receiver at location b. Hence L (a, b) N (0, ). Then, following
the approach of [24], [25], the correlation between two links is modeled as E (L (a, b) L (c, d)) =
2 exp ( (|a c| + |b d|)), where |a c| is the distance between location a and c, and
1/10 m1 . Hence, the correlation between the shadow fading part of the channel loss from
(n, i) to (n + 1, k) and the shadow fading part of the channel loss from (n, i) and (n + 1, l) is

2 exp (h |k l|) .

(12)

and the correlation of the shadow fading part of the channel loss from (n, i) to (n + 1, k) and
the shadow fading part of the channel loss from (n, j) to (n + 1, l) as

2 exp (h (|i j| + |k l|)) .

(13)

Now consider the channels from (n, i) to (n + 1, j) and from (n, i) to (n + 1, j + 1). In
5
By recipocy, the channel gain does not depend on which node is transmitting and which node is receiving. We set one node
to be the transmitter to make the presentation more concrete.

26

this case, the correlation between these channel gains is 2 exp (h). Thus, as h 0, these
channels become highly correlated (e.g., the correlation coefficient goes to one). Thus, for small
h, neighboring nodes have approximately the same channel gain and hence do not provide any
diversity and do not improve performance. Therefore, as h 0, we expect that the performance
does not continue to increase but converges to an asymptote. Here we seek to determine the
performance limit as h 0.
The correlation and the large number of nodes will pose significant computational problems.
Therefore, in this section we use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the performance. Thus,
we seek to compute a realization of the channel loss of each link. Specifically, for each hop,
a realization can be generated by computing the M 2 dimensional vector, V, that is the channel
losses from one relay-set to the next where VMi+j is the channel loss from node (n, i) to node
(n + 1, j). Then V can be generated via

V = LT W + C

where W is the M 2 column vector with elements that are i.i.d. Gaussian with zero mean and
variance of one, and L is the Cholesky factorization of R which is the covariance matrix with
RMk+l,Mi+j = 2 exp ( (|k i| + |l j|)). Furthermore, C is the vector of path losses with
q

2
2
2
CMi+j = 2.710 log10
d + h (i j) . Thus, if VMi+j < T hresh, then communication
between nodes (n, i) and (n + 1, j) is possible.

By computing a large number of realizations, it is possible to estimate the probability that end
destination is occupied for a specific value of T hresh. The solid lines in Figure 7 show resulting
relationship between the end-to-end performance of a five-hop network, the node density, and the
size of the relay-set. As expected, the larger the relay-set and higher the density, the better the
performance. The average performance of a nominal five-hop path is -67 dB. Thus, by exploiting

27

diversity, the solid curves in Figure 7 show that the performance can improve by as much as 20
dB.

VIII. A R EDUCED D ENSITY A PPROXIMATION

Figure 7 only shows the performance for moderately sized relay-sets. This is due to computational difficulties that arise as M, the number of nodes in a relay-set, grows. Specifically, R,
the channel correlation matrix, has M 2 elements and Cholesky factorization of this matrix is
required, which requires O (M 3 ) FLOPs. Furthermore, as the number of links grows, a larger
number of realizations are required to accurately estimate the performance. However, we see that
as the density of relay-sets increases, the performance appears to continue to increase. However,
the correlation between channels is expected to result in the performance reaching an asymptote
as h 0. Thus, this Monte Carlo approach is not able to display the limits of performance. Here
we employ an approximation that is able to determine the performance for dense relay-sets.
It is known from Extreme Value Theory that, when normalized correctly, a maximum of a
sequence of correlated Gaussian random variables converges to a random variable with Gumbel
distribution [26]. Furthermore, it is also known that, when normalized correctly, the maximum of
a sequence of uncorrelated Gaussian random variables also converges to a random variable with
Gumbel distribution [27]. That is, if the channels are modeled by an independent set of Gaussian
random variables or if the channels are modeled as a correlated set of Gaussian random variables,
the limiting distribution of the best channel will be a Gumbel distribution. This motivates the
approach taken here that models a set correlated channels as a set of uncorrelated channels.
More specifically, for a particular relay-set size and density, we search for a density of nodes
but with uncorrelated channels such that the relay-set with uncorrelated channels preforms the
same as the relay-set with correlated channels over a two-hop network. The performance of a

28

network with these less dense and uncorrelated relay-sets is determined using the approximation
discussed in Section VI. In other words, an accurate model of a two-hop network is found. This
model is then extended to an arbitrarily long network. The two-hop network is approximated as
follows.

The performance of the two-hop network is denoted UCor (T hresh, h, Range), where

UCor (T hresh, h, Range)

there exist a path from (0, bM/2c) to (2, bM/2c) with maximum channel loss < T hresh
.
: =P

where the relay-set has 2 Range/h nodes that are spaced h apart
As described in Section VII, this probability can be estimated through Monte Carlo simulations.

Range,
For the case when the channels are uncorrelated, we define UU ncor T hresh, h,

to be the probability that there exists a 2-hop path, from the source to the destination, that has

minimum channel loss no greater than T hresh. Furthermore, this path is through a network with
nodes with a spacing of h
between nodes and the channels
a relay-set made of 2 Range/h
losses (in dB) is normally distributed with mean 0 and standard deviation
. Thus

UUncor T hresh, h, Range,

r
! !2

h
b2Range/

j
k2
Y c
2 j Range/h

1 T hresh, 2.7 10 log10

,
,
: =1
d2 + h
j=0

where (T hresh, ,
) is the probability of a Gaussian random variable with mean and
standard deviation
being less than T hresh.
and standard deviation
To determine the node spacing h
of the relay-set with uncorrelated
channels that approximates the correlated channel case, we solve the following optimization

29

problem

min

max

T hresh[0,]
h,

UCor (T hresh, h, Range) .

UU ncor T hresh, h, Range,

Note that this approach minimizes the sup-norm of the difference between the two cumulative
distribution functions over a range of thresholds. However, for T hresh large, UUncor and UCor
are both 1 and for T hresh small, they are both 0. Figure 8 shows UCorr and the best UUncorr
for various values of Range and with h = 100m. It can be seen that the fit quite good over a
range to values of Range.
and
Once the optimal value of h
are found, the dense relay-set can be approximated with
a less dense set and it is computationally tractable to determine the end-to-end performance
following the same approach discussed in Section VI, where the correlation of node occupancy
and channel correlation are not taken into account. The o-marked curves in Figure 7 shows
the resulting estimate on the end-to-end performance. Note that for large values of Range, this
approximation closely agrees with the actual performance calculated in the previous section.
However, for smaller values of Range, the fit is worst. The reason for the poor fit in these cases
j
k
and

is that the value of h

are found by matching the probability that node 2, Range/h

is occupied. While not shown here, it has been observed that such an approach does not provide
a good estimate of the probability that node (2, i) is occupied for large or small i, that is, this
approach does not provide a good estimate of node occupancy of nodes on the edge of the
relay-set. For small values of Range, errors in the probability of occupancy of the edge nodes
has a noticeable impact on the performance estimate. However, for large values of Range, the
edge nodes have little impact on the performance.
Figure 7 shows the limits of performance as the node density increases. It is interesting to note
that the performance does converge as expected, but that this convergence does not occur until

Expected Min. Channel Loss (dB)

30

65
60

10
20
40
80
160

55
50
45
40
35
30 -2
10

-1

10
10
10
relay density (nodes/meter)

10

Fig. 7. End-to-End Performance of a 5Hop Network with Correlated Channel Loss. The x-axis is the node density within
a relay-set, while the y-axis indicates the end-to-end performance. The curves represent the relationship between node density
and performance for several different ranges of relay-sets (See Figure 1). The solid curves result from result from Monte Carlo
simulations. The o-marked curves result from reducing the dense relay-set to a sparser set but with uncorrelated channels.
Furthermore, the occupancy of nodes is assumed to be independent as in Section VI. Note that the inter-relay-set distance is
100 m. The expected worst channel loss over the nominal path is 67 dB.

a very high density of 10 nodes per meter. Furthermore, Figure 7 shows that the performance
increases when the relay-set Range changes from 80 m to 160 m. No substantial increase in
performance was found for Range larger than 160m. Thus, fairly large and dense relay-sets are
required to extract to best performance. The performance shown in Figure 7 should be compared
with the performance along the nominal path, which provides an expected maximum channel loss
of 67 dB. Thus, we see that for very dense and large relay-sets, the performance improvement
provided by diversity can be as large as 33 dB, or a factor of approximately 2000. Of course,
there may be other drawbacks to large and dense relay-sets, and hence some compromise must
be found that balances the gains provided by diversity with the difficulties with large and dense
relay-sets.

IX. P ERFORMANCE WITH R EALISTIC P ROPAGATION

The results above assumes that the propagation is modeled with lognormal shadow fading.
In this section, the behavior of diversity is examined when the channel losses are derived from

31

Prob.

0.5

Range=160m
Range=80m
Range=40m
Range=20m
Range=10m

0
20
40
60
80
Min Max Channel Loss (dB)
Fig. 8. Two-Hop Performance - Correlated and Fitted Uncorrelated. The above shows the two-hop performance for several
ranges of relay-sets. The solid lines show the performance for correlated channels while the dashed lines show the two-hop
performance for fitted uncorrelated channels. For small relay-set sizes, some difference between the correlated channel and
uncorrelated fit can be detected. However, for larger ranges, the solid and dashed lines are exactly on top of each other.

a realistic propagation model. Specifically, here we consider a nine block region of downtown
Dallas, TX. A GIS map of this region was acquired and ray-tracing was performed. Ray-tracing
provides realistic propagation (e.g., see [28]). The mobility pattern is also realistic, and is derived
from several surveys, including the US Department of Labor and Statistics survey of time-use.
See [29] for more details on the mobility model. In these simulations only 3000 nodes (people)
were considered. Considering the large buildings in this region, 3000 nodes leaves the region
relatively sparsely populated; on average, there was only a 1.2 nodes in a region of 10 m. Further
work is required to determine the performance when the node population is more dense.
In this example, a source and destination are selected at random. Then, a single shortest
geographic path between the nodes is created by selecting nodes such that they are 50 m apart
and follow a straight line from source to destination. Hence, this single path is much like the
nominal path shown in Figure 1. We call the nodes that make up this nominal path, the primary
nodes. The performance along this nominal path is computed. Next, a set of nodes that are with
Range of a primary node are included into the relay-sets. Thus, the topology, resembles that of
Figure 1, but the relay-sets are in circular regions around the primary nodes, not vertical lines. The

Mean improvement in
signal strength (dB)

32

20
8 hops
7 hops
6 hops
5 hops
4 hops
3 hops

15
10
5
0
0

50
Range

100

Fig. 9. Performance improvement offered by diversity when the propagation is derived from ray-tracing-based propagation
models of Dallas TX.

end-to-end performance is computed for different values of Range. This process was repeated
and the results are shown in Figure 9. It can be seen that as the number of hops increases, the
impact of diversity grows. This behavior is the same as was discussed in Section IV-.1 and is
repeatedly shown throughout this investigation. Furthermore, as Range grows, the performance
improves. When comparing the performance of a realistic propagation to that shown in Figure
7, it can be seen that the realistic propagation provides slightly less performance improvement.
Specifically, a node density of 101 nodes/m in Figure 7 shows performance improvement of a
5-hop network to be between 10 and 20 dB, for Range between 20 and 80 m. Figure 9 shows a
five-hop network yields slightly smaller improvements that range from 10 dB to 13 dB. A more
in-depth exploration of propagation and its impact on urban multihop networks is forthcoming.

X. C ONCLUSIONS
The achievable improvement provided by diversity in a multihop network has been examined.
First, a simple topology was examined where the impact of path loss was ignored. In this case,
a computationally simple technique to determined the performance is provided. Furthermore, in

33

this case it is shown that, if the statistics of links are held constant, then, in some settings,
the end-to-end performance improves as the path grows longer. This behavior can also be
seen when path loss is considered. It was then shown how much diversity can impact the
performance. For example, for a particular five-hop topology, it is shown that the performance
can be improved by 33 dB when the density of nodes goes to infinity. While much of the
paper focused on the well known lognormal shadow fading propagation model, the impact of
diversity was investigated when the propagation is derived from a ray-tracing propagation model.
However, due to computational complexity, this investigation focused on low density topologies
with approximately 1.2 nodes/m. Nonetheless, in this low density, but realistic environment, it
was found that diversity can bring large gains in performance and that longer paths provide better
performance than shorter paths. However, further work is required to determine the behavior in
other cities, other node densities, and other types of networks (e.g., MANET and MESH).
While this investigation shows that large improvements in performance are possible, it remains
to be seen whether such performance can be attained. In the case of mobile networks, finding and
maintaining the optimal route may require extensive overhead [19]. However, for fixed wireless
networks, such as mesh networks, such improvements in performance may be achievable. For
example, [30] represents some effort in the fixed mesh network setting.

D ISCLAIMER
The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should
not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army
Research Laboratory or the U. S. Government.

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