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Cooperative routing, combining cooperative communication in the physical layer and routing technology in the network layer, is one of the most widely used technologies for improving end-to-end transmission reliability and delay in the wireless multi-hop networks. However, the existing cooperative routing schemes are designed based on an optimal fixed-path routing so that the end-to-end performance is greatly restricted by the low spatial efficiency. To address this problem, in this paper an opportunistic cooperative packet transmission (OCPT) scheme is explored by combining cooperative communication and opportunistic routing. The proposed scheme divides the multi-hop route into multiple virtual multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmissions. Before each transmission, based on the idea of opportunistic routing, a cluster head (CH) is introduced to determine the multiple transmitters and multiple receivers to form a cluster. Then, the single-hop transmission distance is defined as the metric of forward progress to the destination. Each intra-cluster cooperative packet transmission is formulated as a transmit beamforming optimization problem, and an iterative optimal beamforming policy is proposed to solve the problem and maximize the single-hop transmission distance. CH organizes multiple transmitters to cooperatively transmit packets to multiple receivers with the optimized transmit beamforming vector. Finally, according to the transmission results, the cluster is updated and the new cooperative transmission is started. Iteratively, the transmission lasts until the destination has successfully received the packet. We comprehensively evaluate the OCPT scheme by comparing it with conventional routing schemes. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed OCPT scheme is effective on shortening the end-to-end transmission delay, increasing the number of successful packet transmissions and improving the packet arrival ratio and transmission efficiency.

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