Routing Strategies in Multihop Cooperative Networks

The fading characteristics and broadcast nature of wireless channels are usually not fully considered in the design of routing protocols for wireless networks. In this paper, we address the routing issue from a link layer point of view. We focus on a multihop network with multiple relays at each hop and three routing strategies are designed to achieve the full diversity gain provided by the cooperation among relays. In particular, an optimal routing strategy is proposed to minimize the end-to-end outage, which requires the channel information of all the links and serves as a performance bound. An ad-hoc routing strategy is then proposed based on a hop-by-hop relay selection, which can be easily implemented in a distributed way. The outage analysis shows that the performance gap between these two routing strategies increases with the number of hops. To achieve a good complexity-performance tradeoff, a N-hop routing strategy is further proposed, where a joint optimization is performed every N hops. Simulation results are presented which verify the analysis.