Traffic relaying in multi-hop wireless networks

We analyze the achievable data rate of relaying strategies in a wireless network where nodes are equipped with half-duplex radios. The nodes need to deliver their data to a destination node, possibly at different rates, through multi-hop communications. In such a scenario, we first derive a cut-set upper bound to the achievable rate(s), then we take into account the interference among simultaneous transmissions and devise a communication strategy. Such a strategy ensures a high rate allocation to the nodes, which is also fair, i.e., it provides the desired proportion among the average data rates of the nodes. Our results show that the proposed strategy closely approximates the bound for any value of SNR.