On the Design of Routing Protocols for MIMO Ad Hoc Networks Under Uniform and Correlated Traffic

In this paper, the authors investigate the effects of different routing choices in a MIMO ad hoc network. The MIMO physical layer provides a number of degrees of freedom that a correct protocol design could exploit to the network's advantage. To illustrate this point, they compare two approaches. The first is fixed shortest path forwarding, with routes computed a priori. The second involves a dynamic relay choice based on a specific metric. This metric has been designed to yield an overall assessment of the relay's ability to forward packets. A key point of their design lays in its cross-layer nature that allows to harvest the advantages coming from the interaction of the physical layer and the upper layers.