Joint maximum sum-rate receiver design and power allocation strategy for multihop wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we consider a multihop wireless sensor network (WSN) with multiple relay nodes for each hop where the amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme is employed. We present a strategy to jointly design the linear receiver and the power allocation parameters via an alternating optimization approach that maximizes the sum-rate of the WSN. We derive constrained maximum sum-rate (MSR) expressions along with an algorithm to compute the linear receiver and the power allocation parameters with the optimal complex amplification coefficients for each relay node. Computer simulations show good performance of our proposed methods in terms of sum-rate compared to the method with equal power allocation.