Cooperative coding and routing in multiple-terminal wireless networks

Abstract

We investigate information-theoretic achievable rates for multiple-terminal wireless networks. First, we find the best way to route data from the source to the destination if each relay must fully decode the source message. We design an algorithm that finds a set of routes, containing a rate-maximizing one, without needing to optimize the code used by the nodes. In addition, we propose an algorithm with polynomial running time that finds an optimal route with high probability. Second, we study the trade-off between level of node cooperation and achievable rates. We find that the performance of local cooperation is close to that of whole-network cooperation in the low SNR regime. Last, we investigate achievable rates for networks where the source data might be correlated. We study how different coding strategies perform in different channel settings. For special cases, we show that some coding strategies actually approach the capacity.