Maximal Lifetime Scheduling for Cooperative Communications in Wireless Networks

Recently, cooperative communication is shown to be a promising technology to achieve spatial diversity by keeping each node with only one antenna and having a node exploit a relay node\´s antenna. Most previous works assume that there are multiple source-destination pairs and multiple relay nodes in a network where each node only serves as one role: either transmission node or relay node. However, this assumption will not always hold in practice where each node has its own information to transmit. This paper studies the maximal lifetime scheduling problem for cooperative communication with guaranteed throughput service in a network environment where there are multiple source-destination pairs and each node can serve as both two roles: transmission node and "relay" node. We first analyze the power allocation of optimal lifetime for a single source-destination pair with a bounded throughput in different communication modes, and then design an optimal polynomial-time algorithm to maximize the network lifetime. This algorithm is based on iteration and tries to find a better solution than that before in each iteration. After that, the optimality of this algorithm has been proved formally. The simulation results show that the algorithm can prolong about 199% lifetime than that of direct transmission.