We study benefits of opportunistic routing in a large wireless ad hoc network
by examining how the power, delay, and total throughput scale as the number of
source- destination pairs increases up to the operating maximum. Our
opportunistic routing is novel in a sense that it is massively parallel, i.e.,
it is performed by many nodes simultaneously to maximize the opportunistic gain
while controlling the inter-user interference. The scaling behavior of
conventional multi-hop transmission that does not employ opportunistic routing
is also examined for comparison. Our results indicate that our opportunistic
routing can exhibit a net improvement in overall power--delay trade-off over
the conventional routing by providing up to a logarithmic boost in the scaling
law. Such a gain is possible since the receivers can tolerate more interference
due to the increased received signal power provided by the multi-user diversity
gain, which means that having more simultaneous transmissions is possible.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, Under Review for Possible Publication in IEEE
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