Joint Routing and Power Allocation Optimization for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Efficient routing protocols for equal power and optimal power allocation in a multi-hop decode-and-forward network in fading are proposed. The end-to-end outage probability from source to destination is used as the optimization criterion. The problem of finding the optimal route is investigated when either the mean channel state information (CSI) or the instantaneous CSI for all the links of the network is known at a central controller. The analysis shows that the proposed routing strategy achieves full diversity, equal to the total number of nodes in the network excluding the destination, only when instantaneous CSI is known and used. The average number of hops and the performances of the proposed schemes are examined for several numbers of nodes in the network and different values of path loss exponent.