Interference analysis and management for spatially reused cooperative multihop wireless networks

In this paper, we consider a decode-and-forward-based wireless multihop network with a single source node, a single destination node, and N intermediate nodes. To increase the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency of the system, we propose a cooperative multihop communication protocol with spatial reuse, in which interference is treated as noise or can be canceled. The performance of a spatial-reused space-time-coded cooperative multihop network is analyzed over Rayleigh fading channels. In particular, the exact closed-form expression for the outage probability at the nth receiving node is derived when there are multiple interference sources over non-i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels. Furthermore, the outage probability expressions are derived when nodes are equipped with more than one antenna. In addition, to reduce the effect of interference on multihop transmission, we propose a simple power control scheme that is only dependent on the statistical knowledge of channels. In the second approach for managing the interference, linear interference cancelation schemes are employed for both noncooperative and cooperative spatial-reused multihop transmissions. Finally, the analytic results were confirmed by simulations. Simulation results show that the spatial-reused multihop transmission outperforms the interference-free multihop transmission in terms of energy efficiency in low- and medium-signal-to-noise scenarios.