Novel MIMO based cooperative routing in wireless networks

In this paper, we classify the cooperative routing algorithms into three categories: MISO based, SIMO based and MIMO based, according to the number of sender/relay nodes and receiver nodes in each hop of the route. We found that most existing cooperative routing algorithms, are in fact MISO based (e.g. CAN and Clustered Cooperative) or SIMO based (e.g. selective routing), while MIMO based cooperative routing has not been carefully investigated. To fully exploit the merit of spatial diversity achieved by cooperation, we proposed two MIMO based minimum energy cooperative routing algorithms, consisting multiple senders and multiple receivers each hop. Developed from CAN (Cooperative Along Minimum Energy Non-Cooperative Path), B-CAN (Blocked CAN) and M-CAN (Multicast CAN) both provide MIMO based suboptimal cooperative route with acceptable complexity. In B-CAN, the minimum energy route is divided into several blocks, where optimal routing is formed in each block. In M-CAN, more and more nodes are added into the non-cooperative minimum energy route to construct a suboptimal path step by step. Simulation results show that both B-CAN and M-CAN outperform MISO based CAN-L and PC-L in energy saving in both grid and random networks.