On capacity of relay-assisted communication

Abstract

In this paper, we study communication in wireless networks where there is no central control available, like wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. We derive the outage probability of multi-bop communication and study it in detail for a simple linear topology. The results indicate that an appropriate choice of route can lead to large performance gains over alternate routes. In the second part of the paper, we consider the problem of estimating outage-minimizing routes using channel measurements. We show that finding the optimal routes reliably requires many independent channel measurements, which is equivalent to sending multiple mute discovery requests. The large overbead in route discovery can prove to he counter-prodncIive in networks which transmit information at the same time-scale as the mobility ofnodes.

Enabling large-scale wireless broadband

“…With the above conceptual organization, we observe that routing protocols are network channel estimators. 4 Similar to the establishment of the relationship between the number of channel measurements and long-term route throughput for simple linear topologies [25], the routing protocol overhead is related to the level of network mobility and the resulting system capacity.…”