Increasing the One-Hop Progress of Nearest Neighbor Forwarding

Nearest neighbor forwarding (NNF) intends to maximize throughput in wireless networks. However, NNF suffers from low one-hop progress and may therefore significantly increase end-to-end delay. The spatial efficiency (SE), i.e., the expectation of the ratio of progress to interference area associated with one hop, is introduced in order to quantify this tradeoff. The problem of low progress is addressed by maximizing the one-hop SE, subject to the central angle $\gamma$, determining the forwarding area. By this, the optimal balance between minimizing the interference area and maximizing progress is found. Then, this analysis is extended by considering a Poisson point process, driven by some traffic intensity, on the interference area. Furthermore, the traffic aware $\gamma^{\ast}$-NNF strategy is proposed which adapts $\gamma$ to the traffic intensity in order to maximize SE. Simulation results show a significant reduction of the end-to-end delay if $\gamma^{\ast}$-NNF is used.