On the Throughput Capacity of Cooperative Multi-hop Wireless Ad hoc Networks with Multi-flow

Cooperative relaying techniques are known to provide spatial diversity for wireless fading channels. In contrast to non-cooperative transmission (direct transmission), they increase link reliability, provide higher capacity, reduce transmit power, and extend transmission range. Mostly the gains of cooperative relaying are shown for single flow scenarios in the absence of inter-flow interference. In this paper we study the effect of inter-flow interference on the capacity of cooperative networks in multi-hop multi-flow settings. We used the conflict graph to model the interference and find the additional constraints introduced due to cooperative transmission by using the concept of cliques on the conflict graph, which can be used to capture the interference relation among links. We formulated the multi-commodity flow problem for network capacity using linear programming, and employed a clique based analysis of the conflict graph to compute interference constraints. It is observed that the throughput drops significantly when cooperative transmissions are used in the network. We also found that the hop counts increase when cooperative links are used that is due to avoiding interfering links, which results in losing the benefits of shortest-path routing.