Cooperative Transmission in a Wireless Relay Network based on Flow Management

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flow management-based cooperative transmission design for multi-node half-duplex wireless relay networks, optimizing diversity-multiplexing tradeoff and outperforming traditional bounds.

Contribution

It presents a novel convex flow optimization approach and a simplified generalized-link selection protocol that achieve optimal DMT in relay networks.

Findings

Protocols achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff.

Simulation results quantify performance gap to max-flow-min-cut bounds.

Proposed methods outperform existing bounds in outage probability.

Abstract

In this paper, a cooperative transmission design for a general multi-node half-duplex wireless relay network is presented. It is assumed that the nodes operate in half-duplex mode and that channel information is available at the nodes. The proposed design involves solving a convex flow optimization problem on a graph that models the relay network. A much simpler generalized-link selection protocol based on the above design is also presented. Both the proposed flow-optimized protocol and the generalized-link selection protocol are shown to achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) for the relay network. Moreover, simulation results are presented to quantify the gap between the performances of the proposed protocols and that of a max-flow-min-cut type bound, in terms of outage probability.