On the Relay-Based Coverage Extension for Non-Conventional Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Due to the rapid growth of personal communications, it is now believed that multi-hop topologies will certainly play a key role in forthcoming wireless communications scenarios. Amongst other aspects, they will facilitate the appearance of new business models, allowing e.g. the possibility for operators to extend their services on a cost effective way. In this sense, an end-user may act as a relaying node, offering other end-users the possibility to connect to a base station (or access point) even if these were not able to do it directly (because e.g. they were not within the coverage area or they were not costumers of that operator). This paper analyzes one of the benefits brought about by multi-hop accesses, particularly the coverage extension that could be enabled by these approaches, by performing both an analytical and a simulation study. We analyze the outage probability over different network deployments, increasing the number of hops that a user might employ to reach an access point.