Joint Cooperation and Multi-Hopping Increase the Capacity of Wireless Networks

In this paper the authors study the communication among nodes in an extended network, where both signal interference and power decay are limiting factors of the network capacity. Through the asymptotic analysis of a proposed three-phase communication scheme, they quantify how the appropriate combination of node cooperation, in the form of distributed virtual antenna arrays, and multi-hop message relaying, among optimally sized clusters of nodes, can increase the network throughput. The use of spatially separated clusters of distributed antennas brings benefits from both the spatial multiplexing gain of MIMO and the mitigation of interference.