Cooperative Transmission in a Wireless Cluster Based on Flow Management

In this paper, a cooperative transmission design for a multi-node wireless cluster network is presented. It is assumed that the nodes operate in half-duplex mode and that channel information is available at the nodes. The proposed design involves solving a convex flow optimization problem on a fully connected graph that models the cluster network. A much simpler generalized routing protocol based on the above design is also presented. Both the proposed flow-optimized protocol and the generalized routing protocol are shown to achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for the cluster network. Moreover, simulation results are presented to quantify the gap between the performance of the proposed protocols and that of a max-flow-min-cut type bound, in terms of outage probability.