Towards MAC/Anycast Diversity in IEEE 802.11n MIMO Networks

Opportunistic Routing (OR) is a novel routing technique for wireless mesh networks that exploits the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. OR combines frames from multiple receivers and therefore creates a form of Spatial Diversity, called MAC Diversity. The gain from OR is especially high in networks where the majority of links has a high packet loss probability. The updated IEEE 802.11n standard improves the physical layer with the ability to use multiple transmit and receive antennas, i.e., Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO), and therefore already offers spatial diversity on the physical layer, i.e., called Physical Diversity, which improves the reliability of a wireless link by reducing its error rate.