End-to-End Throughput and Latency Measures for Multi-hop Routing in Relay-Assisted Broadband Cellular OFDM Systems

End-to-end optimization of certain quality of service (QoS) measures such as throughput, reliability and latency plays a key role in designing novel network architectures for next generation relay-assisted broadband cellular multi-hop networks. In this paper, we study the problem of multi-hop routing in broadband cellular networks assuming transmissions under orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation over each link. Considering a routing protocol that employs rate-adaptive relaying and OFDM-based codeword transmissions over each hop, supported by an automatic repeat request (ARQ) mechanism against transmission errors, we characterize the end-to-end capacity of multi-hop communication, develop measures for end-to-end throughput and latency as a function of the physical channel and system parameters and propose routing metrics to track and dynamically optimize end-to-end QoS in broadband cellular multi-hop networks