Joint relay assignment and rate–power allocation for multiple paths in cooperative networks

Multi-path transmission is an efficient way to balance the power consumption from a source to a destination. The previous works have studied rate–power allocation to prolong the network lifetime of multiple paths. As at least one relay node is required to participate into cooperative transmission, its assignment will greatly impact the power consumption of cooperative communication. Thus, this paper addresses the joint resource allocation problem which aims to prolong the lifetime of multi-path cooperative transmission. Given a path set from a source to a destination, we first define the lifetime-optimal relay assignment and rate–power allocation problem (LRRP) for multiple paths with cooperative communications. This paper then presents two heuristic algorithms, called BS-RRP and PS-RRP, to implement efficient resource allocation for multiple paths. The BS-RRP algorithm uses the binary search method to solve the LRRP problem on node-disjoint paths, and reaches the approximate performance 1 − ɛ, where ɛ is an arbitrarily small positive constant. PS-RRP adopts the pattern search method for joint resource allocation on link-disjoint paths, and terminates after finite iterations. The simulation results show that the BS-RRP and PS-RRP algorithms can improve the network lifetimes about 26 and 30 % compared with the resource allocation methods under the non-cooperative communication scheme.