Joint routing and scheduling optimization in arbitrary ad hoc networks: Comparison of cooperative and hop-by-hop forwarding

Cooperation schemes form a key aspect of infrastructure-less wireless networks that allow nodes that cannot directly communicate to exchange information through the help of intermediate nodes. The most widely adopted approach is based on hop-by-hop forwarding at the network layer along a path to destination. Cooperative relaying brings cooperation to the physical layer in order to fully exploit wireless resources. The concept exploits channel diversity by using multiple radio units to transmit the same message. The underlying fundamentals of cooperative relaying have been quite well-studied from a transmission efficiency point of view, in particular with a single pair of source and destination. Results of its performance gain in a multi-hop networking context with multiple sources and destinations are, however, less available. In this paper, we provide an optimization approach to assess the performance gain of cooperative relaying vis-a-vis conventional multi-hop forwarding under arbitrary network topology. The approach joint optimizes packet routing and transmission scheduling, and generalizes classical optimization schemes for non-cooperative networks. We provide numerical results demonstrating that the gain of cooperative relaying in networking scenarios is in general rather small and decreases when network connectivity and the number of traffic flows increase, due to interference and resource reuse limitations. In addition to quantifying the performance gain, our approach leads to a new framework for optimizing routing and scheduling in cooperative networks under a generalized Spacial Time Division Multiple Access (STDMA) scheme.