Multihop Diversity for Fading Mitigation in Multihop Wireless Networks

The concept of multihop diversity is proposed, where all the nodes of a multihop link are assumed to have buffers for temporarily storing their received packets. During each time-slot, the best hop having, for example, the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), is selected from the set of those hops that have packets awaiting transmission in the buffer. The packet is then transmitted over the best hop. This hop-selection procedure yields selection diversity, but it requires the global channel knowledge of the hops’ channel quality. In this paper, we assume having perfect channel knowledge and focus our attention on the principles and performance bounds of the error probability and outage probability. Our studies show that relying on multiple hops has the potential of providing a significant diversity gain, which may be exploited for enhancing the reliability of wireless multihop communications

Decentralized Dynamic Hop Selection and Power Control in Cognitive Multi-hop Relay Systems

In this paper, we consider a cognitive multi-hop relay secondary user (SU) system sharing the spectrum with some primary users (PU). The transmit power as well as the hop selection of the cognitive relays can be dynamically adapted according to the local (and causal) knowledge of the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) in the multi-hop SU system. We shall determine a low complexity, decentralized algorithm to maximize the average end-to-end throughput of the SU system with dynamic spatial reuse. The problem is challenging due to the decentralized requirement as well as the causality constraint on the knowledge of CSI. Furthermore, the problem belongs to the class of stochastic Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problems which is quite challenging. We exploit the time-scale difference between the PU activity and the CSI fluctuations and decompose the problem into a master problem and subproblems. We derive an asymptotically optimal low complexity solution using divide-and-conquer and illustrate that significant performance gain can be obtained through dynamic hop selection and power control. The worst case complexity and memory requirement of the proposed algorithm is O(M^2) and O(M^3) respectively, where $M$ is the number of SUs

Jointly Optimal Channel Pairing and Power Allocation for Multichannel Multihop Relaying

We study the problem of channel pairing and power allocation in a multichannel multihop relay network to enhance the end-to-end data rate. Both amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying strategies are considered. Given fixed power allocation to the channels, we show that channel pairing over multiple hops can be decomposed into independent pairing problems at each relay, and a sorted-SNR channel pairing strategy is sum-rate optimal, where each relay pairs its incoming and outgoing channels by their SNR order. For the joint optimization of channel pairing and power allocation under both total and individual power constraints, we show that the problem can be decoupled into two subproblems solved separately. This separation principle is established by observing the equivalence between sorting SNRs and sorting channel gains in the jointly optimal solution. It significantly reduces the computational complexity in finding the jointly optimal solution. It follows that the channel pairing problem in joint optimization can be again decomposed into independent pairing problems at each relay based on sorted channel gains. The solution for optimizing power allocation for DF relaying is also provided, as well as an asymptotically optimal solution for AF relaying. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate substantial performance gain of the jointly optimal solution over some suboptimal alternatives. It is also observed that more gain is obtained from optimal channel pairing than optimal power allocation through judiciously exploiting the variation among multiple channels. Impact of the variation of channel gain, the number of channels, and the number of hops on the performance gain is also studied through numerical examples.Comment: 15 pages. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Multihop Diversity for Fading Mitigation in Multihop Wireless Networks

The concept of multihop diversity is proposed, where all the nodes of a multihop link are assumed to have buffers for temporarily storing their received packets. During each time-slot, the best hop having, for example, the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), is selected from the set of those hops that have packets awaiting transmission in the buffer. The packet is then transmitted over the best hop. This hop-selection procedure yields selection diversity, but it requires the global channel knowledge of the hops’ channel quality. In this paper, we assume having perfect channel knowledge and focus our attention on the principles and performance bounds of the error probability and outage probability. Our studies show that relying on multiple hops has the potential of providing a significant diversity gain, which may be exploited for enhancing the reliability of wireless multihop communications