On-demand diversity wireless relay networks

There has been much recent attention on using wireless relay networks to forward data from mobile nodes to a base station. This network architecture is motivated by performance improvements obtained by leveraging the highest quality links to a base station for data transfer. With the advent of agile radios it is possible to improve the performance of relay networks through intelligent frequency assignments. First, it is beneficial if the links of the relay network are orthogonal with respect to each other so that simultaneous transmission on all links is possible. Second, diversity can be added to hops in the relay network to reduce error rates. In this paper we present algorithms for forming such relay networks dynamically. The formation algorithms support intelligent frequency assignments. Our results show that algorithms that order the sequence in which nodes join a relay network carefully achieve the highest amount of diversity and hence best performance.