Efficient cooperative protocols for general outage-limited multihop wireless networks

Due to the limited energy supplies of nodes in wireless networks, achieving energy efficiency is crucial for extending the lifetime of these networks. Thus, we study efficient power allocations and transmission protocols for outage-restricted multihop wireless networks based on cooperative transmission. In such multihop networks, a number of nodes, acting as relays, can assist a source node in the transmission of its messages to a single destination. In this paper, several multihop transmission protocols with cooperative routing are proposed. Each of the proposed protocols offers a different rate and energy efficiency. Cooperative routing protocols are introduced using arbitrary distributed space-time codes for the purpose of energy savings, given a required outage probability at the destination. Three efficient cooperative multihop transmissions are proposed, and their corresponding distributed power allocation schemes, which depend only on the statistics of the channels, are also derived. The proposed cooperative protocols offer different degrees of energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, complexity, and signalling overhead. Simulations show that, using the proposed cooperative protocols, substantial energy savings are achievable, compared to non-cooperative multihop routing, in a network having an outage probability constraint.