Interference analysis in cooperative multi-hop networks subject to multiple flows

This paper studies the effects of allowing multiple packets to flow simultaneously in a cooperative multi-hop transmission system. Although, the packet delivery rate may increase with multiple packet flows, however, the desired signals of one packet may get interfered with the signals of the other packets in the network, thereby causing some of the packets to die off. This phenomenon is analyzed by modeling the multi-hop transmission as a conditional Markov process, followed by the derivation of its transition matrix. The resulting distribution is used to calculate the outage probability of a node in a cooperative environment in the presence of desired as well as interfering signals. The model is then used to obtain the network coverage, until which a packet can travel for a given packet delivery ratio constraint. Numerical simulations are performed to validate the analytical models.