In this paper, we consider single-source, single-sink (ss-ss) multi-hop relay networks, with slow-fading Rayleigh links and single-antenna relay nodes operating under the half-duplex constraint. We present protocols and codes to achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of two classes of networks. Networks belonging to the first class can be viewed as the union of K node-disjoint parallel paths, each of length > 1, labeled here as KPP networks. The results are extended to variants including KPP(I) networks which permit causal interference between paths and KPP(D) networks which posses a direct link from source to sink. The second class is comprised of layered networks in which each layer is fully connected. We also draw some results for more general networks. For an arbitrary network with multiple flows, we show that the maximum achievable diversity gain for each flow is equal to the corresponding min-cut and present a simple amplify-andforward (AF) scheme for achiev...
K. Sreeram, S. Birenjith, P. Vijay Kumar