The problem of communication among nodes in an is considered, where radio power decay and interference are limiting factors. It has been shown previously that, with simple multi-hopping, the achievable total communication rate in such a network is at most @math . In this work, we study the benefit of node cooperation in conjunction with multi-hopping on the network capacity. We propose a multi-phase communication scheme, combining distributed MIMO transmission with multi-hop forwarding among clusters of nodes. We derive the network throughput of this communication scheme and determine the optimal cluster size. This provides a constructive lower bound on the network capacity. We first show that in a rate of @math can be achieved with transmission power scaling of @math , where @math is the signal path-loss exponent. We further extend this result to , where we show a rate of @math can be achieved with transmission power scaling of @math in a random network with unit node density. In particular, as @math approaches 2, only constant transmission power is required. Finally, we study a random network with density @math and show that a rate of @math is achieved and the required power scales as @math .
@cite_12: n source and destination pairs randomly located in a fixed area want to communicate with each other. It is well known that classical multihop architectures that decode and forward packets can deliver at most a radicn-scaling of the aggregate throughput. The performance is limited by the mutual interference between communicating nodes. We show however that a linear scaling of the capacity with n can in fact be achieved by more intelligent node cooperation and distributed MIMO communication. The key ingredient is a hierarchical and digital architecture for nodal exchange of information for realizing the cooperation.
Our work is motivated by @cite_12 . However, we propose a multi-hop distributed MIMO scheme specifically designed for extended networks. Furthermore, we show that with a small increase in the transmission power, our scheme performs uniformly better than simple multi-hopping for all values of @math . As far as we are aware, there is no existing work on analyzing the achievable rate of combining cooperative communication and multi-hop forwarding.