Fig. 1

In this example, the focus is on what node 1 does to allow node S (source) to route its packets to node D (destination). The dashed circle represents the radio range for node 1 and defines its neighbors. To ensure a distributed design, two key elements are exploited: (a) node 1 adopts its transmission behavior to each of its neighbors. Here, node 1 interacts with node 2 (indicated by the dotted box); (b) only the available knowledge of the quality of the most influential links is accounted for (denoted generically by \(h_{1}, h_{1}^{\prime }, h_{2}, h_{2}^{\prime }\))