Outage Regions and Optimal Power Allocation for Wireless Relay Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes outage regions and develops optimal power allocation strategies for energy-constrained multi-hop and adaptive multi-route wireless relay networks, demonstrating the benefits of cooperation strategies at low rates.

Contribution

It derives outage probability minimization strategies based on node distances and compares the rate gains of adaptive multi-route and multi-hop schemes.

Findings

Combined direct transmission and adaptive multi-route outperforms multi-hop at all rates.

Cooperation strategies are most beneficial for low-rate, low-outage systems.

At higher rates, direct transmission becomes more advantageous.

Abstract

We study outage regions for energy-constrained multi-hop and adaptive multi-route networks with an arbitrary number of relay nodes. Optimal power allocation strategies in the sense that outage probability is minimized are derived depending on the distances between the transmit nodes. We further investigate the rate gain of adaptive multi-route and multi-hop over direct transmission. It is shown that a combined strategy of direct transmission and adaptive multi-route outperforms multi-hop for all values of rate R. It can be stated that cooperation strategies are beneficial for low-rate systems where the main goal is a very low outage probability of the network. As the rate is increased, direct transmission becomes more and more attractive.