Distributed Link Scheduling, Power Control and Routing for Multi-hop Wireless MIMO Networks

In this paper, we develop a cross-layer, yet distributed, resource allocation mechanism in multi-hop wireless MIMO networks over time varying channels. The objective is to design a scalable scheduler which uses minimum total power to transfer the information bits for all the end-to-end connections at the requested rates. To this end, we decompose the system into multiple isolated MIMO broadcast subsystems. In each time slot, each subsystem independently decides the transmit power, the antenna weights, the transmission rates and the forwarding rules of information bits based on the channel state information and previous decisions of other neighboring subsystems. The proposed algorithm converges asymptotically to the optimal solution under the decomposition.