Full spatial reuse multi-hop cooperative communication

In this paper, we present multi-hop relay communication strategies for half-duplex decode-and-forward relay networks. The model for the channel that we consider includes pathloss, shadowing, and fast fading. For this channel model, we propose a full spatial reuse multi-hop (FSRM) relay communication scheme, which allows relays to transmit their data using every other time slot. With the FSRM scheme, the end-to-end rate reduction factor of multi-hop relay communication is fixed at 1/2, regardless of the number of hops. We analyze the outage probability of the proposed scheme for a directional antenna system and an omnidirectional antenna system. For a directional antenna system, the analysis reveals that the FSRM scheme achieves a lower outage probability than the traditional orthogonal multi-hop relaying scheme. For an omnidirectional antenna system, we find the SNR region of the proposed scheme that achieves better performance. We further analyze various power allocation methods to manage interference and determine the optimal operation scheme in terms of the SINR.