Interference-Aware Cooperative Communication in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

Abstract

There are a lot of recent interests on cooperative communication (CC) in wireless networks. Despite the large capacity gain of CC in small wireless networks with its capability of mitigating fading taking advantage of spatial diversity, cooperative communication can result in severe interference in large networks and even degraded throughput. The aim of this work is to concurrently exploit multi-radio and multi-channel (MRMC) technique and cooperative transmission technique to combat co-channel interference and improve the performance of multi-hop wireless network. Our proposed solution concurrently considers cooperative routing, channel assignment, and relay selection and takes advantage of both MRMC technique and spatial diversity in cooperative wireless networks to improve the throughput. We propose two important metrics, contention-aware channel utilization routing metric (CACU) to capture the interference cost from both direct transmission and cooperative transmission, and traffic aware channel condition metric (TACC) to evaluate the channel load condition. Based on these metrics, we propose three algorithms for interference-aware cooperative routing, local channel adjustment, and local path and relay adaptation respectively to ensure high performance communications in dynamic wireless networks. Our algorithms are designed to be fully distributed and can effectively mitigate co-channel interference and achieve cooperative diversity gain. To our best knowledge, this is the first distributed solution that supports cooperative communications in MRMC networks. Our performance studies demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can efficiently support cooperative communications in multi-radio multi-hop networks to significantly increase the aggregate throughput.