The presented study combines multi-hop networking with single-hop cooperative communications. The solution is built upon the standard IEEE 802.11 protocol operating in the ad hoc mode. A simulation based comparison is carried out in order to evaluate the performance gains and benefit of cooperative communications applied to multi-hop networking. Preliminary results indicate that network performance in terms of both throughput and end-to-end delay improves. Additionally, cooperative communications increases robustness against uncertainties in the wireless channel.

Plug and play optical (PPO) nodes enable fast, reconfigurable, and flexible ad hoc deployment of optical networks. Once plugged, the PPO nodes provide all-optical circuits between client nodes to alleviate the electronic processing bottleneck of high speed networks. To offer these wavelength routing functionalities to client nodes the PPO nodes must self-adjust to possible changes of the optical physical topology and fiber propagation characteristics. To discover such changes the PPO nodes must make use of a link state advertisement (LSA) protocol that is scalable in the number of plugged PPO nodes. This presentation describes a scalable LSA protocol with constrained message flooding to match the limited propagation reach of the optical signal, i.e., the PPO node transparency island (TI). Scalability is thus achieved naturally by limiting the link state advertisement scope to only those PPO nodes that need to receive the link updates. As discussed in the presentation, the proposed protocol appears to be a viable solution when the TI size is relatively small, e.g., in optical networks without signal regeneration.