Bi-directional Amplification of Throughput in a Wireless Multi-Hop Network

In wireless networks, the shared broadcast medium enables interactions among nodes and thus introduction of novel communication modes. This paper introduces and analyzes relaying techniques that increase the achievable throughput in multi-hop wireless networks by taking advantage of the bi-directional traffic flow. Such a relaying technique is termed relaying with bi-directional amplification of throughput (BAT-relaying). The BAT-relaying is utilizing the concept of anti-packets, defined for bi-directional traffic flows. The relay node combines the packets (anti-packets) that are destined for different nodes and broadcasts the combined packet. The first variant, termed decode-and-forward (DF) BAT-relaying, has been proposed before in the literature. It combines the packets by using the XOR operation, which makes such proposal closely related to the network coding approaches. We proposed another type of BAT-relaying based on amplify-and-forward (AF), which utilizes the inherent packet combining that emerges from simultaneous utilization of a multiple access channel. We analyze the achievable throughput of the DF and AF BAT-relaying, regarding the impact of the traffic asymmetry and the channel errors. The unconventionality of this relaying, in particular AF BAT-relaying, opens many possibilities for further research