The importance of being overheard
Mikhail A. Afanasyev, Alex C. Snoeren · 2009
A flurry of recent work has focused on the performance gains that may be achieved by leveraging the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. In particular, researchers have observed that nodes other than the intended recipient of a packet may overhear the transmission in certain settings. Systems have been proposed to leverage this so-called overhearing phenomena by opportunistically adjusting forwarding paths, suppressing similar transmissions, and superimposing packet transmissions using network coding. The effectiveness of such approaches in practice depends greatly on the empirical overhearing rate, which is a function not only of the particular network and its environment, but also upon individual nodes' transmission rates.