Diversity Backpressure Scheduling and Routing With Mutual Information Accumulation in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

We suggest and analyze algorithms for routing in multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks that exploit mutual information accumulation as the physical layer transmission scheme, and are capable of routing multiple packet streams (commodities) when only the average channel state information is present, and that only locally. The proposed algorithms are the modifications of the diversity backpressure (DIVBAR) algorithm, under which the packet whose commodity has the largest “backpressure metric” is chosen to be transmitted and is forwarded through the link with the largest differential backlog (queue length). In contrast to traditional DIVBAR, each receiving node stores and accumulates the partially received packet in a separate “partial packet queue”, thus increasing the probability of successful reception during a later possible retransmission. We present two variants of the algorithm: DIVBAR-renewal mutual information accumulation (RMIA), under which all the receiving nodes clear the received partial information of a packet once one or more receiving nodes firstly decode the packet; and DIVBAR-full mutual information accumulation (FMIA), under which all the receiving nodes retain the partial information of a packet until the packet has reached its destination. We characterize the network capacity region with the RMIA transmission scheme and prove that (under certain mild conditions) it is strictly larger than the network capacity region with the repetition (REP) transmission scheme that is used by the traditional DIVBAR. We also prove that DIVBAR-RMIA is throughput-optimal among the policies with RMIA, i.e., it achieves the network capacity region with RMIA, which in turn demonstrates that DIVBAR-RMIA outperforms traditional DIVBAR with respect to the achievable throughput. Moreover, we prove that DIVBAR-FMIA performs at least as well as DIVBAR-RMIA with respect to throughput. Simulations also confirm these results.