Joint routing and relay selection in DAF multi-hop cooperative ad hoc networks

Cooperative diversity techniques have recently received a lot of attention due to their ability to provide spatial diversity in fading wireless environment, thus increases link reliability, provides higher capacity and reduces transmit power for the same level of performance. In this paper we study a joint problem of relay selection, power allocation and routing in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks based on cooperative transmission. In particular, an optimal routing strategy is proposed to minimize the end-to-end total transmission power subject to end-to-end target rate. An ad-hoc routing strategy is proposed to find an optimal route (in terms of total transmit power minimizing) for decode-and forward strategy based on the well known Dijikstra algorithm which can be easily implemented in distributed way. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy has great improvement in terms of power saving compared with traditional non-cooperative shortest path algorithms, by more than 70% in some simulation scenario.