Cooperative Routing With Relay Assignment in Multiradio Multihop Wireless Networks

Cooperative communication (CC) for wireless networks has gained a lot of recent interests. It has been shown that CC has the potential to significantly increase the capacity of wireless networks, with its ability of mitigating fading by exploiting spatial diversity. However, most of the works on CC are limited to single radio wireless network. To demonstrate the benefits of CC in multiradio multihop wireless network, this paper studies a joint problem of multiradio cooperative routing and relay assignment to maximize the minimum rate among a set of concurrent communication sessions. We first model this problem as a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem and prove it to be NP-hard. Then, we propose a centralized algorithm and a distributed algorithm to solve the problem. The centralized algorithm is designed within a branch-and-bound framework by using the relaxation of the formulated MIP, which can find a global (1+ε)-optimal solution. Our distributed algorithm includes two subalgorithms: a cooperative route selection subalgorithm and a fairness-aware route adjustment subalgorithm. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and the significant rate gains that can be achieved by incorporating CC in multiradio multihop networks.