Analysis of Multihop Relaying Networks: Communication Between Range-Limited and Cooperative Nodes

The focus of this article is on analyzing the impact of the number of hops and the number of transmit and receive antennas, at the relay nodes, on the performance of multihop networks. The vision of future wireless networks includes a greater role for ubiquitous ad hoc networks based on multihop transmissions between machines and general mobile devices carried around by users. With this in mind, the standards are set to include greater capabilities and specifications regarding ad hoc mesh networks, especially ones that employ multiple antennas for transmissions. Therefore, there is a need for an in-depth analysis of the performance of such networks. In this analysis, we consider equidistant distributed relays between the source and destination. The statistics of the channels of all hops and the noise powers at all terminals are assumed to be the same. The capacity for the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying schemes over the single-input single-output (SISO) channel is compared. Moreover, we derive a closed-form solution of the ergodic capacity in the presence of Rayleigh fading for multihop wireless transmissions when the DF-relaying scheme and SISO links between the relay nodes are employed. The quality of service (QoS) of the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) [Alamouti space-time block code (STBC)-based scheme] multihop networks are studied, and their performance is compared analytically with each other.