Relaying protocols

The maximum amount of information that can be sent over the shared medium in a wireless network is constrained by the interference among nodes. For long distance communications, the transmitted signal suffers attenuation and also produces interference to more nodes in the system. In contrast, short distance communications produce interference to a smaller number of neighbors, allowing more communication channels to be active in the wireless network. This advantage of short distance wireless communications motivated the use of multihop networks. In such a network, nodes pass information to the next ones, until the data reaches its destination node.

definition for : Relay function

types of relay functions