Routing and Power Allocation in MIMO Two-Way Multihop Networks: A New Cross-Layer Approach to Mitigate Interference

We propose a new cross-layer approach to mitigate interference in multihop networks. Precisely, we cancel all adjacent node interference in a multihop path by MIMO two-way relay scheme and jointly optimize the routing and power allocation to mitigate the interference from far nodes. We model and efficiently solve this optimization problem using a geometric programming framework. Our simulation results showed that this cross-layer approach provided significant end-to-end capacity gain and outperformed conventional multihop schemes. Also, a number of hops ranging from 2 to 6 was optimal in interference-limited regime. Finally, single hop MIMO routing was shown to provide higher capacity only in very high SNR scenarios.