Cooperation and Routing in Multi-Hop Networks

— We study the cross-layer problem of combining routing and cooperative diversity in multi-hop, bandwidthconstrained networks with dedicated multiple access. Previous work in cooperative diversity nearly always assumes cooperation to be a positive. We show that in a large scale multi-hop network, cooperation must only be used selectively. Our figure of merit is achievable data rate between a source and destination at a fixed probability of outage. We show that enforcing multiple hops is detrimental to performance, since each extra hop requires bandwidth expansion. This performance can be significantly improved by incorporating a selective cooperative diversity scheme on a one-hop link. On the other hand, the simulation results show that cooperative diversity does not improve performance over a dynamic routing protocol which searches for the optimal, non-diversity, route. Including the search for cooperative nodes into the dynamic route search, however, does further increase flow ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICC
• Authors: Elzbieta Beres, Raviraj Adve
• Keywords: Bandwidth Expansion, Communications, Cooperative Diversity, Cooperative Diversity Scheme, ICC 2007