Capacity of Cooperative Wireless Networks Using Multiple Channels
Devu Manikantan Shila, Yu Cheng, Tricha Anjali · 2010
The existence of channel variations (or fading) is one of the crucial challenges that affects the capacity of wireless networks. Recently, cooperative communications have emerged as a promising approach to achieve spatial diversity and thereby reduce the negative effects of fading on wireless channels. On the other hand, in addition to channel variations, it is well-known that interference among concurrent transmissions also severely limits the network capacity particularly in multi-hop settings. Recent studies indicate that the use of multiple channels can reduce the wireless interference and thus greatly improve the overall network capacity. In this paper, we propose a model termed as CoopMC which employs multiple channels in cooperative networks to mitigate the impact of interference. This work primarily investigates the capacity of CoopMC in multi-hop settings and derive the asymptotic capacity bounds under random placements of nodes. Our analysis reveals the important insights on when a network can benefit from cooperative communications and how multi-channel networking can further improve the network capacity.