Multiuser diversity has been shown to increase the throughput of mobile ad hoc wireless networks (MANETs) when compared to fixed wireless networks. This paper addresses a multiuser diversity strategy that permits one of multiple one-time relays to deliver a packet to its destination. We show that the Θ(1) throughput of the original single one-time relay strategy is preserved by our multi-copy technique. The reason behind achieving the same asymptotic throughput is the fact that, as we

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... e in this paper, interference for communicating among closest neighbors is bounded for different channel path losses, even when n goes to infinity. We show that a significant delay reduction is possible by multi-copy relaying when n is finite. Furthermore, we find that the average delay and delay variance for both the one and multi-copy relay strategies scale like Θ(n) and Θ(n 2 ), respectively. We derive an approximation of the delay for multi-copy forwarding scheme and demonstrate that this approximation is very close to simulation results in MANET systems.