University of Rostock

In recent years the economic importance of wireless communication networks has increased dramatically. Besides the traditional cellular mobile networks also mesh networks are a major research area since many years. Many studies in this field deal with either the route finding on OSI layer 3 or with cooperative transmission methods at the physical level. Only few studies have dealt with finding cooperative routes in mesh networks. In this joint project cooperative routing methods are to be developed that determine suitable routes through a network, based on cooperation at the physical level. For that purpose an optimization problem has to be tackled that covers OSI layers 1-3 and that is NP-hard in many cases. As part of this project suboptimal but efficient algorithms have to be found that work for in either centralized or decentralized networks. For a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of cooperative techniques, the signaling overhead has to be analyzed and appropriate protocols have to be found.