Multihop communications in future mobile radio networks

Cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLAN) are being widely deployed for mobile radio communications. Taking into account the advantageous and drawbacks of both network architectures, it becomes obvious that a combination of them is the logical consequence for future mobile radio networks. The scope of this paper is to introduce a future radio network architecture called hierarchical multihop cellular network (HMCN), which includes several multihop cells. The overlaying cellular network coordinates multihop cells in order to reach an optimal load balance in the whole network. The next evolutionary step towards a HMCN structure is to introduce multihop capable nodes (MHN), which can be fixed or even mobile. The paper shows the challenges and benefits of multihop with fixed nodes, especially the placement of fixed MHN and reduction of radio protocol overhead in order to provide high performance. When MHN are normal mobile nodes, multihop routing becomes a key point in the HMCN concept. The paper proposes a cellular based routing scheme and compares it with the ad hoc routing algorithms being developed by IETF.