Capacity of Cooperative Wireless Networks Using Multiple Channels

The existence of channel variations (or fading) is one of the crucial challenges that affects the capacity of wireless networks. Recently, cooperative communications have emerged as a promising approach to achieve spatial diversity and thereby reduce the negative effects of fading on wireless channels. On the other hand, in addition to channel variations, it is well-known that interference among concurrent transmissions also severely limits the network capacity particularly in multi-hop settings. Recent studies indicate that the use of multiple channels can reduce the wireless interference and thus greatly improve the overall network capacity. In this paper, we propose a model termed as CoopMC which employs multiple channels in cooperative networks to mitigate the impact of interference. This work primarily investigates the capacity of CoopMC in multi-hop settings and derive the asymptotic capacity bounds under random placements of nodes. Our analysis reveals the important insights on when a network can benefit from cooperative communications and how multi-channel networking can further improve the network capacity.